News - Thematic area articles

Transforming space data into climate action

ESA’s Earth observation activities are playing a key role in the revitalised global drive to combat climate change.

News - Spotlight on EO community

Introducing Mirko Albani

In this short introduction, ESA's Heritage Missions Programme Manager describes what he likes most about ESA's long term archive of satellite mission data and his role in the programme.

Activity - Projects

Dragon 2 Cooperation Programme

The Dragon 2 Programme focussed on the exploitation of ESA, ESA's Third Party Missions and Chinese Earth observation data for science and applications development in land, ocean and atmospheric applications.

News - Data Release news

New reprocessing of datasets celebrates 30 years of ERS

The ERS programme celebrated its 30th anniversary on 17 July. Today, we are still exploiting ERS data and experts continue to work on improving the altimeter, radiometer and SAR data the programme acquired.

News - Success Stories

ERS Heritage Data allow for 30 years of science

At their time of launch thirty years ago, the two ERS satellites were the most sophisticated Earth observation spacecraft ever developed and launched by Europe.

News - Infographics

ERS - ESA’s first Earth observation satellites

To mark the 30th anniversary of ERS, we've released a new infographic summarising the mission.

Tools - Apps

Heritage Missions app for iOS

Download the Heritage Missions application to discover what the missions were about, how it worked and what the elements of the space and ground segment that make these missions unique.

Tools - Apps

Heritage Missions app for Android

Download the Heritage Missions application to discover what the missions were about, how it worked and what the elements of the space and ground segment that make these missions unique.

Data - EO Sign In Authentication (Open)

SPOT 4-5 Take5 ESA archive

At the end of SPOT-4 mission, the Take5 experiment was launched and the satellite was moved to a lower orbit to obtain a 5 day repeat cycle, same repetition of Sentinel-2. Thanks to this orbit, from 1 February to 19 June 2013 a time series of images acquired every 5 days with constant angle and over 45 different sites were observed. In analogy to the previous SPOT-4 Take-5 experiment, also SPOT-5 was placed in a 5 days cycle orbit and 145 selected sites were acquired every 5 days under constant angles from 8 April to 31 August 2015. With a resolution of 10 m, the following processing levels are available: Level 1A: reflectance at the top of atmosphere (TOA), not orthorectified products Level 1C: data orthorectified reflectance at the top of atmosphere (TOA) Level 2A: data orthorectified surface reflectance after atmospheric correction (BOA), along with clouds mask and their shadow, and mask of water and snow. Spatial coverage: Check the spatial coverage of the collection on a map available on the Third Party Missions Dissemination Service.

Data - Fast Registration with approval (Restrained)

SPOT 1-5 ESA archive

The ESA SPOT 1-5 collection is a dataset of SPOT 1 to 5 Panchromatic and Multispectral products that ESA collected over the years. The HRV(IR) sensor onboard SPOT 1-4 provides data at 10 m spatial resolution Panchromatic mode (-1 band) and 20 m (Multispectral mode -3 or 4 bands). The HRG sensor on board of SPOT-5 provides spatial resolution of the imagery to < 3 m in the panchromatic band and to 10 m in the multispectral mode (3 bands). The SWIR band imagery remains at 20 m. The dataset mainly focuses on European and African sites but some American, Asian and Greenland areas are also covered. Spatial coverage: Check the spatial coverage of the collection on a map available on the Third Party Missions Dissemination Service. The SPOT Collection

Data - Fast Registration with approval (Restrained)

Image 2006 European coverage

The Image 2006 collection is a SPOT-4, SPOT-5 and ResourceSat-1 (also known as IRS-P6) cloud free coverage over 38 European countries in 2006 (from February 2005 to November 2007). The Level 1 data provided in this collection originate from the SPOT-4 HRVIR instrument (with 20 m spatial resolution), from SPOT-5 HRG (with 10 m spatial resolution resampled to 20 m) and IRS-P6 LISS III (with 23 m spatial resolution), each with four spectral bands. The swath is of about 60 km for the SPOT satellites and 140 km for the IRS-P6 satellite. In addition to the Level 1, the collection provides the same data geometrically corrected towards a European Map Projection with 25 m resolution. Spatial coverage: Check the spatial coverage of the collection on a map available on the Third Party Missions Dissemination Service.

Data - Fast Registration with approval (Restrained)

ERS-1/2 ATSR Averaged Surface Temperature [AT1/AT2_AR__2P]

The Averaged Surface Temperature Product (AST) contains averaged geophysical data at two different resolutions, and with respect to two different averaging schemes: measurement data sets at resolutions of 0.5 by 0.5 degrees and 10 by 10 arcmin with respect to a latitude/longitude grid; other data sets contain data averaged over equal area cells of 50 by 50 km and 17 by 17 km aligned with the satellite ground track. Both top-of-atmosphere and surface data sets are provided. The surface temperature data sets provide, for sea cells, nadir and dual view sea surface temperatures, and for land cells, land surface temperature (currently 11 micron BT) and NDVI. Cloud data is also included. No ADS are included in the AST product; auxiliary data is contained within the MDS. The data sets of the AST product are arranged by surface type and resolution. The 3rd reprocessing of ATSR data was performed in 2013; the processing updates that have been put in place and the scientific improvements are outlined in full in the User Summary Note for the Third ERS ATSR Reprocessing.

Data - Fast Registration with approval (Restrained)

ERS-1/2 ATSR Gridded Surface Temperature [AT1/AT2_NR__2P]

The Gridded Surface Temperature (GST) Product is the Level 2 full resolution geophysical product. The product contains gridded sea-surface temperature images using both nadir and dual view retrieval algorithms. The product includes pixel latitude/longitude positions, X/Y offset and the results of the cloud-clearing/land-flagging. It contains a single measurement data set the content of which is switchable, that is to say, the content of each pixel field will depend on the surface type. Specifically, the contents of the data fields will depend on the setting of the forward and nadir cloud flags and the land flag. The 3rd reprocessing of ATSR data was performed in 2013; the processing updates that have been put in place and the scientific improvements are outlined in full in the User Summary Note for the Third ERS ATSR Reprocessing.

Data - Fast Registration with approval (Restrained)

ERS-1/2 ATSR Gridded Brightness Temperature/Reflectance [AT1/AT2_TOA_1P]

The Gridded Brightness Temperature/Reflectance (GBTR) product contains top of atmosphere (TOA) brightness temperature (BT) values for the infra-red channels and reflectance values for the visible channels. Values for each channel and for the nadir and forward views occupy separate measurement data sets. Additional MDS contain cloud and land/sea flags and confidence flags for each image pixel. The 3rd reprocessing of ATSR data was performed in 2013; the processing updates that have been put in place and the scientific improvements are outlined in full in the User Summary Note for the Third ERS ATSR Reprocessing.

Mission - Heritage Missions

ERS

The ERS programme was composed of two missions, ERS-1 and ERS-2, which together observed the Earth for 20 years, from 1991 to 2011.

Activity - Quality

SCIRoCCo

The SCIRoCCo project is an interdisciplinary cooperation of scatterometry experts aimed at promoting the continuing exploitation of ESA's unique 20 years' worth of ERS Scatterometer data.

Mission - Heritage Missions

SPOT

The SPOT (from French "Satellite pour l'Observation de la Terre") series of missions has been supplying high-resolution, wide-area optical imagery since 1986.

Document - General Reference

DRAGON 2 Programme - Brochure 2009

The Dragon Programme is a cooperation between ESA and the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of the P.R. China. This brochure presents the activities undertaken since the formal start of the programme in April 2009, its background, objectives, partners and project themes.

Document - Proceedings

2004 Envisat and ERS Symposium

The 2004 Envisat and ERS Symposium was held in Salzburg - Austria from 6 to 10 September 2004. The 2004 Envisat and ERS Symposium provided a forum for investigators to present results of ongoing research project activities and assess the development of applications and services.

Document - Proceedings

ERS-Envisat Symposium