Tuesday, May 3rd, 2016
ESA and Airbus Defence and Space UK signed a €229 million contract on 29 April to build the next Earth Explorer: the Biomass satellite, due to begin its mission in 2021. The satellite will provide global maps of how much carbon is stored in the world’s forests and how this stock is changing over time,
Thursday, March 31st, 2016
ESA and Australia’s national geological survey, Geoscience Australia, today agreed to cooperate to ensure data from the EU’s Sentinel satellites are accessible in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. The agreement supports the Australian government and European Commission’s partnership to ensure the EU’s Copernicus Earth observation programme benefits their citizens and the broader international community.
Friday, March 25th, 2016
The European Space Agency (ESA) will host its Summer School on GNSS program for students July 18–29 at the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Varese, Italy. The 11-day event is open to graduate students that have studied more than three years; Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers younger than 35 years old; and young engineers
Tuesday, March 15th, 2016
ESA has agreed with NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the US Geological Survey (USGS) to make data available to them from the European Sentinel satellites. With the third Copernicus satellite, Sentinel-3A, recently launched, ESA has signed technical arrangements with these US agencies for accessing Sentinel data. These arrangements coordinate the technical implementation
Thursday, March 10th, 2016
10 March 2016 The Sentinel-1B satellite has arrived in French Guiana to be prepared for liftoff on 22 April. It will join its identical twin, Sentinel-1A, in orbit to provide more radar views of Earth for Europe’s Copernicus environmental monitoring effort. The satellites each carry an advanced radar for all-weather, day-and-night coverage of Earth’s surface.
Thursday, March 3rd, 2016
With deforestation accounting for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions, satellite observations have an important role to play in mapping this changing ecosystem. ESA is therefore going to great lengths to make sure a new sensor will live up to its promise. Deforestation and forest degradation release about the same amount of greenhouse gases into the
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2016
Just two weeks after launch, the latest Sentinel satellite has offered a taster of what it will provide for the EU’s Copernicus programme. Sentinel-3A’s very first image, captured at 14:09 GMT on 29 February, shows the transition from day to night over Svalbard, Norway. As well as showing the snow-covered archipelago, the image also details
Tuesday, February 16th, 2016
Climate change is much discussed, says Dr Simon Keogh of the Met Office, and to inform the conversation the Met Office uses historical scientific data including sea-surface temperature records, based on data from the Along Track Scanning Radiometer (ATSR) series of satellite instruments. These instruments, designed and built in the UK, provided accurate infrared measurements
Monday, February 8th, 2016
8 February 2016 — Monitoring Earth’s surface every day, ESA’s Proba-V minisatellite has had a ringside seat as the second largest lake in Bolivia gradually dried up. Lake Poopó has now been declared fully evaporated. The three 100-m resolution Proba-V images shown here were acquired on 27 April 2014, 20 July 2015 and 22 January
Monday, January 18th, 2016
EDRS-A, the first relay satellite in the SpaceDataHighway programme (also called EDRS), will be launched to geostationary orbit on 28 January 2016 (Baikonour time). The SpaceDataHighway will provide high speed laser communications in space of up to 1.8 Gigabit per second. This major programme, which cost nearly €500M to develop, is the result of a
