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MISSIONS
Explore the European Space Agency's Earth Observation satellite missions. Learn all about ESA's dedicated Earth Explorers or collaborations with other agencies through the Third Party Missions programme.
Mission - Earth Explorers
SMOS
The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission is dedicated to making global observations of soil moisture over land and salinity over oceans.
Mission - Earth Watch
PROBA-V
The PROBA-V mission provides multispectral images to study the evolution of the vegetation cover on a daily and global basis.
Mission - Third Party Missions
PROBA-1
PROBA-1 is a technology demonstration satellite that later became an operational Earth observation mission.
Mission - Heritage Missions
Envisat
Envisat was ESA's successor to ERS. Envisat carried ten instruments aboard for a wide range of Earth observing fields. The mission was operational from 2002 to 2012.
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.
Mission - Third Party Missions
FSSCat
The FSSCat mission was an innovative concept that consisted of two federated 6-Unit Cubesats, called ³Cat-5/A and ³Cat-5/B, which operated in support of the Copernicus Land and Marine Environment services.
Mission - Third Party Missions
Vision-1
Launched on 16 September 2018, Vision-1 offers orthorectified products with resolution up to 87 cm in panchromatic mode and 3.48 in multispectral mode as standard.
Mission - Third Party Missions
WorldView-4
WorldView-4 was an imaging and environment-monitoring satellite from Maxar of the United States, which offered very high resolution imagery.
Mission - Heritage Missions
IRS-1C and IRS-1D
The Indian Remote Sensing satellites IRS-1C and IRS-1D were identical Earth-imaging satellites operated by the Indian Space Research Organisation.
Mission - Heritage Missions
Landsat Series
The Landsat Series is the world's longest running system of satellites for moderate-resolution optical remote sensing for land, coastal areas and shallow waters.
Mission - Heritage Missions
Landsat-1 to Landsat-3
The Landsat-1 to 3 satellites were the first in the United States' Landsat programme, dedicated to monitoring the Earth's land mass.
Mission - Heritage Missions
GEOSAT
The GEOSAT series consists of GEOSAT-1 and GEOSAT-2 missions. They are Earth imaging satellites. GEOSAT-2, a high resolution satellite, became the first European fully-private satellite capable of providing sub-metric multi-spectral imagery.
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.
Mission - Heritage Missions
SPOT 4
SPOT 4, like all the SPOT missions, was aimed at supplying high-resolution, wide-area optical imagery.
Mission - Heritage Missions
SPOT 3
SPOT 3, like all the SPOT missions, was aimed at supplying high-resolution, wide-area optical imagery.
Mission - Heritage Missions
SPOT 2
SPOT 2, like all the SPOT missions, was aimed at supplying high-resolution, wide-area optical imagery.
Mission - Heritage Missions
SPOT 1
SPOT 1 was designed to improve the knowledge and management of Earth's resources, detecting and forecasting phenomena involving climatology and oceanography, and monitoring human activities and natural phenomena.
Mission - Third Party Missions
IRS-R2 (ResourceSat-2)
IRS-R2 (ResourceSat-2) continues the remote sensing data services to global users provided by the ResourceSat-1 mission and also provides data with enhanced multispectral/ spatial coverage.
Mission - Heritage Missions
RapidEye
Together, the five RapidEye satellites were capable of collecting over 4 million square kilometres of 5 m resolution, 5-band colour imagery every day.
Mission - Third Party Missions
Pléiades
The Pléiades programme followed the SPOT programme satellite series, introducing advanced technologies in Earth observation.