ESA's Proba-V minisatellite reveals the seasonal changes in Africa's sub-Saharan Sahel, with the rainy season allowing vegetation to blossom between February (top) and September (bottom).

After more than 4 years of successful operations, Proba-V is consolidating its role as a key data provider to the Copernicus Global Land Service as well as a valuable complement to the Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 suite of optical sensors.

Consequently, to further promote the scientific and operational exploitation of Proba-V data, a second "Proba-V Symposium" is taking place from 29 to 31 May 2018 in Belgium.

The Proba-V team is continually striving for product excellence. Platform manoeuvres are planned to improve the overall radiometric calibration of the data. Therefore, gaps in the data can be expected on the following dates: 3,12 and 21 July 2017.

While a fire at a rubbish depot was detected from space by the Copernicus Sentinel-3A and ESA's Proba-V satellites, pollutants in the plume of thick smoke were measured by instruments that will be used to validate information from the upcoming Sentinel-5 Precursor mission.

ESA's Proba-V minisatellite has captured the forest fire raging in central Portugal, revealing blackened scars and columns of smoke as well as pinpointing active fire hotspots.

Proba-V on-board updates will be performed from Wednesday 7 June to Monday 12 June 2017 to maintain the product excellence and further improve the Proba-V datasets.

Proba-V was launched on 07 May 2013 in Kourou, New Guinea. Four years after launch the mission is still operating nominally and is raising the bar by extending its operational services until the end of 2019.

The Proba-V Mission Exploitation Platform (MEP), announced earlier this year, complements the Proba-V user segment by building an operational Exploitation Platform on the data and derived products to 'bring users closer to the data'.

The Mission Exploitation Platform offers multiple online applications. Some useful information on two of them which were recently enhanced - the 'Time Series Viewer' (TSV) and 'Notebooks' - are now available.

As announced in December last year, a full reprocessing of the Proba-V archive was launched during the summer of 2016 to further improve the Proba-V datasets.

We are pleased to inform users that the reprocessing campaign has now been completed.

ESA is pleased to announce the recent release of the first operational version of the Proba-V Mission Exploitation Platform (MEP).