Tuesday, April 5th, 2011
ESA’s Envisat satellite has measured record low levels of ozone over the Euro-Atlantic sector of the northern hemisphere during March. This record low was caused by unusually strong winds, known as the polar vortex, which isolated the atmospheric mass over the North Pole and prevented it from mixing with air in the mid-latitudes. This led to very
Friday, April 1st, 2011
The Soyuz site at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana is now ready for its first launch. ESA yesterday handed over the complex to Arianespace, marking a major step towards this year’s inaugural flight. Construction of the Soyuz site began in February 2007, although initial excavation and ground infrastructure work began in 2005 and 2006, respectively. Read
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
ESA is making land data maps of Europe and Africa available to the public online in near-real time. The maps target land activities that are of particular interest to the agriculture and food-security user communities. The Culture-MERIS service demonstration – based on data from Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) at a resolution of 300 m
Tuesday, March 29th, 2011
Four teams of university students have been selected to conduct their experiments in a series of parabolic microgravity flights on the Airbus A300 Zero-G aircraft. The research ranges from helping restore balance in humans to understanding how planets form. The students were chosen from 13 teams whose proposals were short-listed in September 2010. During the final
Monday, March 28th, 2011
ESA’s Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer mission was launched in 2009 to map variations in Earth’s gravity with extreme detail and accuracy. Two years in orbit have resulted in a unique model of the ‘geoid’ – the surface of an ideal global ocean in the absence of tides and currents, defined only by gravity. The
Thursday, March 24th, 2011
An ESA project has recently demonstrated that new ways of processing satellite data can show how different properties of snow can be observed from space. This new method is expected to lead to a much deeper understanding of the role snow plays in the Earth system. Snow is a fundamental component of Earth’s energy and water
Saturday, March 19th, 2011
The south-eastern parts of Iran (top) and the Arabian Peninsula are featured in this Envisat image. Iran’s landscape, comprising several rugged mountain ranges, a central high plateau, deserts, steppes and coastlands, differs from the Arabian Peninsula, which is dominated by the Arabian Desert. The closest point between the two Middle Eastern countries is the Strait of Hormuz
Thursday, March 10th, 2011
To ensure that a continuous flow of accurate and timely satellite data is available to forecast the weather and study climate change in the coming decades, ESA is looking to the future by preparing the next generation of MetOp satellites. The current MetOp series has three identical satellites. Launched in 2006, MetOp-A is Europe’s first polar-orbiting
Thursday, March 3rd, 2011
Today, the EGNOS Safety-of-Life signal was formally declared available to aviation. For the first time, space-based navigation signals have become officially usable for the critical task of vertically guiding aircraft during landing approaches. By using three satellites and a 40-strong network of ground stations, the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay System (EGNOS) sharpens the accuracy of GPS
Saturday, February 26th, 2011
This Envisat image features the northern part of the Antarctic Peninsula, which stretches beyond the Antarctic Circle to within 1050 km to the southern tip of South America. The 1000-km-long arm of the mountainous peninsula is situated between the Bellingshausen Sea on the west and the Weddell Sea on the east. Along the peninsula, ice
