Launched on 01 March 2002, Envisat has completed ten years of operations. During its operational life, Envisat has played a major role in the progresses made in Earth System Science, as well as on the creation of operational monitoring services, paving the way for future Earth Observation missions.

The Envisat satellite is in good health, despite few sensor anomalies. The Envisat services on the ground have been continuously upgraded in order to satisfy the growing needs of a very large community of users, ranging from scientists in many fields of Earth Science, to several operational applications. The modification of its orbit in 2010 has allowed an extension to the Envisat mission until the end of 2013. The new orbit, together with the good status of the payload would allow, if requested, to further extend the mission in order to ensure the continuity of crucial Earth-observation datasets until the next generation of ESA satellites are fully operational.

This series of images features views of the world acquired by Envisat over its ten years of operation.

This Envisat ASAR image was acquired on 19 August 2002, 9:30 UTC, Orbit 2452 around the town of Dresden (bottom right, bright yellow area) along the Elbe river. The image is taken in Alternate Polarisation mode and the colours are given by the different polarisation (red HH, green HV, and blue the difference between the two). Water-covered areas are clearly visible in blue and around Riesa town flooded areas are quite large. This image was reduced for volume reasons. The original image has a spatial resolution about 25 meters.

Two views of an oil spill approaching the Louisiana coast.

This image covers the south coast of the Galicia region and shows a spot of oil which has reached the coast. The ASAR image was acquired at the beginning of the Envisat mission, and is an excellent tool to monitor and detect oil on water surfaces

More images in this series are available in the Antarctica B-15A iceberg event.

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