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Success Stories
Read articles about the successes of ESA's mission programmes and applications of the data obtained by the satellites.
News - Success Stories
1 Mar 2023Envisat 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
14 Feb 2023Space 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
7 Feb 2023ESA’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.
News - Success Stories
30 Jan 2023Showcasing success stories from ESA's Third Party Missions
ESA’s Third Party Missions programme consists of more than 50 missions from around the world.
News - Success Stories
17 Jan 2023Pléiades 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.
News - Success Stories
10 Jan 2023Artificial intelligence tool to improve efficiency of mission design
ESA have developed a method to automatically extract critical information from space mission data to populate a Knowledge Graph. This tool aims to improve knowledge reuse when designing new missions.
News - Success Stories
16 Dec 2022Atmosphere-studying Odin mission enjoys ongoing success
More than two decades after it began operations, the Odin remote sensing satellite is continuing to make strong contributions to high-impact atmospheric science.
News - Success Stories
24 Nov 2022Drones join the campaign to validate Aeolus data
In June and September 2022, the Askos component of the Joint Aeolus Tropical Atlantic Campaign (JATAC), organised by ESA and its international partners, was expanded with new ground-based, drone and radiosonde measurements. The main objective of this campaign was to calibrate and validate Aeolus satellite observations.
News - Success Stories
22 Nov 2022Robust airborne radar instrument aids CryoSat ice data
During the 12 years that ESA’s ice mission – CryoSat – has been monitoring Earth’s ice masses from space, simultaneous airborne measurements were made by ASIRAS.
News - Success Stories
17 Nov 2022New worldwide dataset captures the planet in fine detail
Scientists have developed an open source planetwide dataset of high-resolution Earth observation imagery, thanks to commercial data delivered by ESA’s Third Party Missions (TPM) programme.
News - Success Stories
10 Nov 2022Long-term satellite data show wind farms can affect local air currents
Decades of satellite data have allowed for the first long-term study of the impact of offshore wind farms on downstream wind flow in coastal areas.
News - Success Stories
3 Nov 2022SMOS data improve estimates of rainfall in Africa
Scientists have used soil moisture data from ESA’s SMOS mission to correct high-resolution satellite-based estimates of precipitation in Africa.
News - Success Stories
27 Oct 2022ESA’s wind mission could help to forecast tropical storms
Global wind profiles delivered by Aeolus have great potential to improve the projections of a long-established hurricane forecasting system developed in the US, according to science published in a leading meteorological journal.
News - Success Stories
25 Oct 2022Studying forest biomass from space
Forestry expert Maurizio Santoro, senior researcher at Gamma Remote Sensing and one of the leaders of ESA projects related to the Climate Change Initiative (CCI), explains how the use of various data.
News - Success Stories
20 Oct 2022Swarm data help estimate the impact of space weather
Energy from space weather mostly deposits itself as heat in the upper atmosphere, posing risks to satellites orbiting in the same altitude.
News - Success Stories
6 Oct 2022Decades of satellite data reveal the risks of climate tipping points
Decades-long time series that draw on ESA’s Earth observation archives are enabling scientists to uncover the threat of sudden and potentially irreversible changes to the icy parts of the planet.
News - Success Stories
4 Oct 2022Remote sensing scientists raise alarm for African savannah
Researchers have used high resolution WorldView-3 imagery to map vegetation cover in the Greater Maasai Mara savannah, a global hotspot for biodiversity in Kenya.
News - Success Stories
27 Sept 2022Heritage data trains neural networks to detect urban sprawl
Using data from non-operational ESA remote sensing missions, researchers have trained a network of artificial neurons to recognise how cities change over decades. They hope this will help city planners reduce the impact that urbanisation has on the environment.
News - Success Stories
16 Sept 2022Satellites track the health of the ozone layer
ESA’s Earth observation activities are contributing to international efforts to monitor and preserve the layer of stratospheric ozone that blankets the planet.
News - Success Stories
7 Sept 2022Satellite data predicts lower wheat crop yield
In a market pressed with short supply of grain the dry spring weather of 2022 was devastating for European wheat production, according to a new drought monitor that draws on data from ESA’s SMOS Earth observation mission