The next Sentinel satellite for Europe's environmental monitoring Copernicus programme is poised for liftoff from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in northern Russia.

An orbit collision avoidance manoeuvre was performed on Swarm Bravo on 16 April 2018 at 16:10 UTC for a duration of 96 secomds equivalent to a Delta V = 2 cm/s.

The European Space Agency is organising 'EO4Alps' - The Alps from Space Workshop, which will take place from 27 to 29 June 2018 at the Villa Blanka Conference Center, in Innsbruck, Austria.

Users interested in participating still have until the 30 April 2018 to submit an abstract.

Due to an anomaly that occurred on the VFM (Vector Field Magnetometer) on board Swarm Charlie, the VFM science data (at 50 Hz rate) was not received from 13/04/2018 19:18 UTC to 16/04/2018 09:21 UTC.

From 16 April to 30 June 2018, public or private organisations involved in developing innovative applications based on Earth Observations (EO) and located in European GEO member countries are invited to come forward with voluntary Expressions of Intent for networking along the value chain.

Getting a satellite ready to be launched involves a long list of jobs, but with the Copernicus Sentinel-3B satellite now fuelled, this particular 'to do' list is significantly shorter. And, importantly, all is on track for lift-off on 25 April.

The batch of new results from ESA's Swarm mission has not only included the highest-resolution map of the magnetic field generated by Earth's crust and a map of the tiny magnetic signals from the oceans, but also, remarkably, some unexpected insight into lightning in the upper atmosphere and geomagnetic storms.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is organising a Φ-week event at ESRIN in Frascati, Italy from 22 to 26 October 2018. The event will focus on EO Open Science and FutureEO - to review the latest developments in Open Science trends and kick-start innovative activities of the recently created Φ-department. This new department is looking at FutureEO, and its associated Φ-lab aims to identify, support and scale bold EO ideas.

Please note that the abstract submission deadline has been extended to 01 May 2018, providing you with additional time to submit your paper.

The magnetic field is arguably one of the most mysterious features of our planet. ESA's Swarm mission is continually yielding more insight into how our protective shield is generated, how it behaves and how it is changing. Adding yet another string to its bow, Swarm is now tracking changes in the magnetic field produced in the oceans in more detail than ever before.

The first models of the fourth release of Swarm magnetic field models are now available to users. The new models are based on improved Swarm magnetometer data (MAGx_LR_1B data products, baseline 05, version 03), covering the period from launch to the end of 2017, i.e. one additional year in comparison to the previous release.