Latest Earth observation satellite Stories
The most authoritative report on climate change to date will be released tomorrow in Paris, France, and is expected to warn of rising global sea levels and temperatures. Earth observation from space plays an invaluable role in helping scientists advance our understanding of climate change and capability to model its evolution.The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) developed the report, "˜Climate Change 2007', over six years with a panel of 2 500 scientific expert reviewers from...
Have you ever wanted to track natural events in progress, such as fires, floods and volcanic eruptions, or simply explore the planet through the eyes of a satellite? ESA has created a website, MIRAVI, which gives access to the most recently acquired images from the world's largest Earth Observation satellite, Envisat.MIRAVI, short for MERIS Images RApid VIsualisation, tracks Envisat around the globe, generates images from the raw data collected by Envisat's optical instrument, MERIS, and...
ESA -- Since its launch in 2002, Envisat, the world's largest and most sophisticated satellite ever built, has been providing scientists and operational users with invaluable data for global monitoring and forecasting "“ and the future looks even brighter. "The Envisat mission has reached its full maturity with the services provided by the satellite now well established, and the scientific results based on its data being increasing published," Envisat Mission Manager Henri Laur...
ESA -- This week's launch of MSG-2 ensures that satellite images continue to be available to European weather forecasters well into the next decade. It also marks a new chapter in a long-term space experiment measuring the available energy that drives the weather as a whole, and helping to establish how much the Earth is heating up. MSG-2's main instrument is the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infra-red Imager (SEVIRI) which returns detailed 12-wavelength images of the Earth and its...
By Jim WolfWASHINGTON (Reuters) - A looming gap in U.S. polar satellite coverage may halve the ability to predict some hurricanes and eat into U.S. war fighting capabilities early in the next decade, Bush administration officials acknowledged to Congress on Wednesday.Currently, polar-orbiting platforms account for more than 90 percent of the data in prediction models used by the departments of defense and commerce, Ronald Sega, the Pentagon's top space official, told the House of...
ESA -- The most detailed portrait ever of the Earth's land surface is being created with ESA's Envisat environmental satellite. The GLOBCOVER project aims at producing a global land cover map to a resolution three times sharper than any previous satellite map.It will be a unique depiction of the face of our planet in 2005, broken down into more than 20 separate land cover classes. The completed GLOBCOVER map will have numerous uses, including plotting worldwide land use trends, studying...
ESA -- Ten years and 52,289 orbits on from its launch, the Earth Observation mission of ESA's ERS-2 satellite continues with all instruments functioning well. A growing global network of ground stations is receiving data from the veteran spacecraft. A solid decade of ERS-2 observations has helped cement a worldwide community of more than 3,000 users. Demand for ERS-2 data is ever increasing, spurred on by the fact that the spacecraft keeps on updating its data archives as it orbits the...
