- All Categories
- Data
- News
- Missions
- Events
- Tools
- Activities
- Instruments
- Campaigns
- Documents
Success Stories
Read articles about the successes of ESA's mission programmes and applications of the data obtained by the satellites.
News - Success Stories
Rome supersite helps validate atmospheric space data
In the sprawling, urban area of Rome, where atmospheric composition is impacted by complex coastal weather and pollution, ESA supports a powerful observatory spread across several locations.
News - Success Stories
ESA Earth observation archives preserved in Arctic vault
ESA has added to its store of Earth observation records housed in a secure vault in the Norwegian Arctic, ensuring that knowledge from a crucial chapter in European remote sensing history is safeguarded for future generations.
News - Success Stories
New CryoSat data to boost understanding of the oceans
A new CryoSat sea level anomaly product designed to enable ocean science and the development of operational marine applications has been released.
News - Success Stories
Synergy of space data helps modernise irrigation systems
The growing demands on agriculture, coupled with the climate crisis, are pressurising Earth’s valuable freshwater resources and making assessment of water practices ever more important.
News - Success Stories
Commercial space data help to regreen grasslands in Africa
Commercial satellite imagery made available through ESA’s Third Party Missions programme is guiding an ambitious community-focused initiative to regrow natural grasslands in Sub-Saharan Africa.
News - Success Stories
Commercial and international data for fire monitoring
As climate change sparks a surge in the frequency and intensity of wildfires, satellite data disseminated through ESA’s Third Party Missions (TPM) programme are helping scientists to track and investigate these potentially damaging natural events.
News - Success Stories
Young scientists bid farewell to ESA's wind mission
Students and early career researchers are saying an emotional goodbye to Aeolus ahead of its upcoming reentry.
News - Success Stories
ESA missions help to reveal worldwide lake water loss trend
Climate change, human consumption and sedimentation are depleting more than half of the world’s biggest lakes of water, according to a ground-breaking analysis that drew on three decades of satellite data.
News - Success Stories
TPM data help advance plastic litter detection from space
Several innovative ESA Discovery element projects exploring remote sensing of plastic marine litter lean on commercial satellite data disseminated via the Agency’s Third Party Mission programme.
News - Success Stories
SMOS data reveal ecosystems' resistance to drought
Climate change is rapidly altering the world’s ecosystems, causing extreme weather conditions, such as droughts, to become increasingly frequent. Understanding the factors that contribute to ecosystem resilience to extreme events is vital to develop more effective strategies for climate adaptation and mitigation.
News - Success Stories
Aeolus enhances volcanic ash forecasts for aviation safety
A new study, using wind data from ESA’s Aeolus mission, highlights the importance of using satellite missions like Aeolus to improve volcanic ash forecasting and ensure aviation safety in the future.
News - Success Stories
Collaboration and perseverance key to success of JATAC
A worldwide community of remote sensing experts came together at EGU 2023 in April to discuss the achievements of an atmosphere dynamics and composition field campaign completed over the tropical Atlantic.
News - Success Stories
Global remote sensing of greenhouse gases ramps up
With growing pressure to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere, recent research studies using the carbon dioxide monitoring TanSat mission are timely.
News - Success Stories
PROBA-V data improve surface albedo products in Africa
As ESA’s PROBA-V satellite marks its 10-year launch milestone, data tasked during the mission’s lifetime are still being used to assess changes in land cover.
News - Success Stories
ESA missions deliver new long-term perspective on sea ice decline
A 29-year timeseries of polar sea ice thickness and volume that draws on altimetry data from a succession of ESA missions has been presented at the European Geoscience Union general assembly.
News - Success Stories
New cross-calibration readies PROBA-1 data for climate research
While PROBA-1 has already exceeded expectations by suppling over 21 years of Earth observation hyperspectral data, recent cross-calibration activities are aiming to ensure the data will robustly serve long time-series research, even when the satellite ends operation.
News - Success Stories
Envisat data show how volcanoes communicate with each other
Using radar data from ESA’s Envisat mission, scientists have recently proven the elastic interaction between two Hawaiian volcanoes.
News - Success Stories
Envisat delivers a decade of insights into ocean oil slicks
More than ten years after it beamed its final image back to Earth, ESA’s Envisat satellite is still helping to investigate and address key societal and environmental challenges.
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.
News - Success Stories
ESA’s wind mission helps investigate the nature of volcanic plumes
An analysis that drew on wind profiles from ESA’s Aeolus mission has resulted in an unexpected discovery concerning the structure and behaviour of plumes emanating from the eruption of the Raikoke volcano in 2019.