Latest Sentinel 3 Stories

ESA An important milestone has been reached for ESA’s Sentinel-3 mission. The satellite platform has been delivered to the Prime Contractor in France where the instruments will be installed and tested along with the numerous components that make up this sophisticated new mission to monitor Earth. Once complete, Sentinel-3 will host an array of state-of-the-art instruments that mainly focus on measuring different aspects of ocean waters, such as the temperature and color of the surface...

Space debris came into focus last week at the International Astronautical Congress in Naples, Italy. Envisat, ESA’s largest Earth observation satellite, ended its mission last spring and was a subject of major interest in the Space Debris and Legal session. Envisat was planned and designed in 1987–1990, a time when space debris was not considered to be a serious problem and before the existence of mitigation guidelines, established by the UN in 2007 and adopted the next year by ESA for...

Controllers from the European Space Agency (ESA) have lost communication with the space agency's flagship Earth observation mission known as Envisat. The mission controllers stopped receiving data from the spacecraft on Sunday, and have not been able to re-establish communications. Envisat, which launched in 2002, has been operating five years longer than its planned mission. While losing communications with satellites is not an uncommon problem, a recovery team is still working to...

Our view of Earth is set to become even sharper with new instruments to be carried on ESA's Sentinel-3 satellites. In many ways, it will be like looking at Earth through a new pair of glasses.Sentinel-3 is one of the five missions that ESA is developing for Europe's Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) initiative.Primarily, Sentinel-3 will deliver data for GMES services related to the marine environment, such as ocean-current forecasting services that need surface-temperature...

ESA Member States have unanimously voted to extend the Envisat mission through to 2013. 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 since its launch in 2002."The decision to extend the Envisat mission operations, taken during the last ESA Earth Observation Program Board meeting, is a recognition of the success of the mission, in terms of the...

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...