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News - Infographics
Discover how RADARSAT scans Earth's surface
Learn about how RADARSAT scans Earth's surface in our new infographic.
News - General News
Overachieving SMOS mission primed for continued success
ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission (SMOS) was the second Earth Explorer launched in 2009. Over 13 years on, having already vastly exceeded its predicted lifetime and initial objectives, the mission has been further extended until at least the end of 2025.
News - Maintenance News
SMOS - Planned maintenance on 29 March 2023
Due to planned maintenance activities at Ifremer, the "SMOS Ocean Wind products" collection will not be regularly updated from 2023/03/29 at 4:00 UTC to 2023/03/30, until full operations resume.
News - Thematic area articles
Remote Sensing data underpin research on Soil
Environmental data disseminated by ESA’s Earth observation programmes provide knowledge about the stresses on Earth’s soils – aiding many applications such as crop management, drought and flood forecasting, and ecosystem protection.
News - General News
ESA's excellent Earth Explorer missions extended to 2025
Since 2009, ESA’s Earth Explorer missions have pioneered breakthrough technologies and transformed our understanding of Earth’s system, from its core to the outer stretches of the atmosphere.
News - Thematic area articles
Monitoring water on Earth's surface
ESA's Earth observation satellites are playing a leading role in furthering our understanding of how Earth's terrestrial hydrosphere is being influenced by humankind.
Data - Announcement of Opportunity
Announcement of Opportunity for SAOCOM
In cooperation with CONAE (Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales), ESA is launching an Announcement of Opportunity for the international scientific community to access data from the SAOCOM mission for science and EO-based applications development.
News - Data Release news
New data available: GEOSAT-2 Portugal Coverage 2021
A new collection is available to the public through ESA’s Earthnet Third Party Missions Programme: the GEOSAT-2 Portugal Coverage 2021.
News - Data Release news
European Cities: Cartosat-1 Euro-Maps 3D DSMs and Ortho Images
ESA is pleased to announce that the Cartosat-1 Euro-Maps 3D Digital Surface Model (DSM) and ortho image products collection on European cities has been opened to users in the framework of Earthnet’s Third Party Mission Programme.
Document - Newsletter
Earth-Online-Newsletter-17-February-2023
This issue of the Earth Online Newsletter covers a selection of the latest news and events from ESA.
Data - Data Description
GEOSAT-2 Portugal Coverage 2021
GEOSAT-2 Portugal coverage is a collection of 2021 data over the Portugal area, including islands. The available dataset has a cloud cover less than 10%, and is acquired up to 1m resolution with Geometric accuracy <6m CE90 based on Copernicus DEM @10m. GEOSAT-2 Portugal 2021 - Spatial Coverage of the Dataset The following product types are available: Pan-sharpened (4 bands, 321 Natural Colours or 432 False Colours): A four-band image, resulting from adding the information of each multispectral band to the panchromatic band. The fusion does not preserves all spectral features of the multispectral bands, so it should not be used for radiometric purposes. Resolution 1m; Bands: All, R-G-B or Ni-R-G Bundle: Panchromatic (1m resolution) + Multispectral bands (4m resolution): five-band image containing the panchromatic and multispectral products packaged together, with band co-registration. The available processing level is L1C orthorectified: a calibrated and radiometrically corrected product, manually orthorectified and resampled to a map grid. Product Type Processing Level and Spatial Resolution L1B (native) L1C (ortho) Pan-sharpened 1.0m 1.0m Bundle (PAN+MS) 1.0m (P), 4.0m (MS) 1.0m (P), 4.0m(MS)
News - Success Stories
Space data unearths small-scale mining in Burkina Faso
Satellite data from ESA’s Pléiades Third Party Mission and Copernicus Sentinel-2 were used to demonstrate that deep learning models can accurately and inexpensively identify artisanal and small-scale mining, even in challenging semi-desertic environments.
Data - Data Description
European Cities: Cartosat-1 Euro-Maps 3D
A large number of European cities are covered by this dataset; for each city you can find one or more Cartosat-1 ortho image products and one or more Euro-Maps 3D DSM tiles clipped to the extent of the ortho coverage. The Euro-Maps 3D DSM is a homogeneous, 5 m spaced Digital Surface Model semi-automatically derived from 2.5 m Cartosat-1 in-flight stereo data with a vertical accuracy of 10 m. The very detailed and accurate representation of the surface is achieved by using a sophisticated and well adapted algorithm implemented on the basis of the Semi-Global Matching approach. The final product includes several pixel-based quality and traceability layers: The dsm layer (*_dsm.tif) contains the elevation heights as a geocoded raster file The source layer (*_src.tif) contains information about the data source for each height value/pixel The number layer (*_num.tif) contains for each height value/pixel the number of IRS-P5 Cartosat-1 stereo pairs used for the generation of the DEM The quality layer (*_qc.tif) is set to 1 for each height/pixel value derived from IRS-P5 Cartosat-1 data and which meets or exceeds the product specifications The accuracy vertical layer (*_acv.tif) contains the absolute vertical accuracy for each quality controlled height value/pixel. The ortho image is a Panchromatic image at 2.5 m resolution. The following table defines the offered product types. EO-SIP product type Description PAN_PAM_3O IRS-P5 Cartosat-1 ortho image DSM_DEM_3D IRS-P5 Cartosat-1 DSM
News - Data Release news
New Landsat RBV data collection opened to users
ESA is pleased to announce that the Landsat RBV data collection has been opened to users.
Data - Data Description
Landsat RBV
This dataset contains Landsat 3 Return Beam Vidicon (RBV) products, acquired by ESA by the Fucino ground station over its visibility mask. The data (673 scenes) are the result of the digitalization of the original 70 millimetre (mm) black and white film rolls. The RBV instrument was mounted on board the Landsat 1 to 3 satellites between 1972 and 1983, with 80 metre resolution. Three independent co-aligned television cameras, one for each spectral band (band 1: blue-green, band 2: yellow-red, band 3: NIR), constituted this instrument. The RBV system was redesigned for Landsat 3 to use two cameras operating in one broad spectral band (green to near-infrared; 0.505–0.750 µm), mounted side-by-side, with panchromatic spectral response and higher spatial resolution than on Landsat 1 and Landsat 2. Each of the cameras produced a swath of about 90 km (for a total swath of 180 km), with a spatial resolution of 40 m.
News - Success Stories
Pléiades unlocks information about rock glaciers in central Himalaya
As climate change accelerates the melting of glacial ice, remote sensing scientists are tapping into the potential of Pléiades data to help vulnerable mountainous communities.
Document - Newsletter
Earth Online Newsletter - 16 December 2022
This issue of the Earth Online Newsletter covers a selection of the latest news and events from ESA.
News - Thematic area articles
Global understanding of Earth's land surfaces greatly boosted by satellite data
ESA perform land surface monitoring with a range of instruments onboard satellites acquiring optical and radar data. Collections of data from these missions are freely available for research purposes.
Data - Data Description
ALOS PRISM L1C
This collection provides access to the ALOS-1 PRISM (Panchromatic Remote-sensing Instrument for Stereo Mapping) OB1 L1C data acquired by ESA stations (Kiruna, Maspalomas, Matera, Tromsoe) in the ADEN zone, in addition to worldwide data requested by European scientists. The ADEN zone was the area belonging to the European Data node and covered both the European and African continents, a large part of Greenland and the Middle East. The full mission archive is included in this collection, though with gaps in spatial coverage outside of the; with respect to the L1B collection, only scenes acquired in sensor mode, with Cloud Coverage score lower than 70% and a sea percentage lower than 80% are published: Time window: from 2006-08-01 to 2011-03-31 Orbits: from 2768 to 27604 Path (corresponds to JAXA track number): from 1 to 665 Row (corresponds to JAXA scene centre frame number): from 310 to 6790. The L1C processing strongly improve accuracy compared to L1B1 from several tenths of meters in L1B1 (~40 m of northing geolocation error for Forward views and ~10-20 m for easting errors) to some meters in L1C scenes (< 10 m both in north and easting errors). The collection is composed by only PSM_OB1_1C EO-SIP product type, with PRISM sensor operating in OB1 mode and having the three views (Nadir, Forward and Backward) at 35 km width. The most part of the products contains all the three views, but the Nadir view is always available and is used for the frame number identification. All views are packaged together; each view, in CEOS format, is stored in a directory named according to the JAXA view ID naming convention.
News - Events and Proceedings
SMOS data advances space weather and ionospheric research
ESA is taking steps to innovate ways to use SMOS data to support solar scientists and the space weather community, as set out in a workshop held recently in ESRIN.