Earth Explorers
ESA's Earth Explorer missions are dedicated to addressing key scientific challenges identified by the EO community. Each mission employs the latest technological developments to observe different EO fields.
What are Earth Explorers?
The Earth Explorers programme consists of a series of satellites that share the common goal of advancing Earth science by helping answer principle scientific questions through observation of Earth’s key systems.
The Earth Explorers are each dedicated to observing a different aspect of Earth’s system, such as the Cryosphere, Hydrosphere, Atmosphere and Ionosphere as well as the Earth’s interior. The overarching objective of these missions is to understand the Earth as a geosphere and the complex interactions between spheres and sub-spheres.
Current missions from the programme include Aeolus, CryoSat, SMOS and Swarm. The Earth Explorer family will continue to grow in the future through the addition of new missions such as EarthCARE, Biomass and FLEX.
What are the next Earth Explorers?
Learn about the planned missions in the Earth Explorers programme - EarthCARE, Biomass, FLEX, and FORUM - which will further our understandi...
Meet ESA's Swarm Mission Manager
Anja Strømme, ESA's Swarm Mission Manager, describes in detail the wonders of the Swarm mission....
Earth Explorers brochure
This brochure describes ESA's Earth Explorers Space Programme and includes infographics describing some of the missions in the programme....
Pioneering science missions: Summarising ESA’s Earth Explorers
Designed for research purposes, ESA's Earth Explorer missions are dedicated to monitoring parts of Earth’s system. Learn more about the Eart...
Featured Missions
Aeolus
The Aeolus mission provides global observations of wind profiles from space to improve the quality of weather forecasts, and to advance our ...
Biomass
The objective of the Biomass mission is to determine the global distribution of forest biomass....
CryoSat
CryoSat determines variations in the thickness of continental ice sheets and marine ice cover. Europe's first ice mission is an advanced rad...
EarthCARE
EarthCARE will examine the role clouds and aerosols play in trapping infrared radiation emitted from Earth's surface....
FLEX
The FLEX mission will provide global maps of vegetation fluorescence, which can be converted into an indicator of photosynthetic activity....
GOCE
ESA's Gravity field and Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) mission mapped Earth's geoid very accurately, opening a window into Earth's interi...
SMOS
The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission is dedicated to making global observations of soil moisture over land and salinity over ...
Swarm
Swarm is dedicated to creating a highly detailed survey of the Earth’s geomagnetic field and its temporal evolution as well as the electric ...
How to access the data
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Latest Data Release News
Near-Real Time Full Bit Rate (FBR) CryoSat products now available
We’re pleased to announce that as of 15 March 2023, the CryoSat Full Bit Rate (FBR) products are disseminated in Near-Real Time (NRT)....
Aeolus Level-2A old Baseline-11 data now publicly available
We are pleased to inform Aeolus users that 3232 Level 2A products in Baseline 11 that were not previously released are now available for bro...
Additional EFI TII Cross Track Flow dataset 0302 available for Swarm
Additional TII cross-track flow data is now available on the Swarm dissemination server for all the Swarm satellites....
New CryoSat Ice Baseline-E reprocessed data now available
We are pleased to inform the CryoSat scientific community that the reprocessed CryoSat Ice Baseline-E data for all of 2011 has been publishe...
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