Top 10 Earth Observation Stories from the ESA
2023 saw the continued growth of the space sector and satellite market, across manufacturing technology, data and most importantly applications to solve planetary challenges. It's a good time to lend our ear to the ESA (European Space Agency) to have their view on some powerful use cases and look at what 2024 may bring!
ESA top 10 stories and most memorable moments: from Number 10: celebrating 25 years of Copernicus Programme to … Number 1: the launch of the Meteosat Third Generation Imager.
The Copernicus programme has seven satellites in orbit and has provided masses of data and information services to end users to address challenges such as climate change and food security.
The launch of Meteosat meanwhile, is ushering in a new era of satellite meteorology, capturing incredible animations of lightning and revolutionising the prediction of severe storms. Over the next two decades it will provide critical data for short term and early identification of extreme weather events.
Earth from Space, Hurricane Otis. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2023), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
More detail on Meteosat and the lightning strikes here. It’s a great read and shows the whole value chain, from manufacturing (Thales Alenia Space with OHB and Leonardo) to launch and in-orbit services (Telespazio). On the full range of ESA applications (oceans, land surface analysis and more), it’s worth taking a look at EUMETSAT.
For the full download of the top 10 stories go here. You can see videos of Ice Loss from Greenland and Antartica, the new Antarctic mega-iceberg and the end of the Aeolus wind mission. Interestingly, Aeolus wind mission was a first of its kind, it set a new standard for safe re-entry of satellites and space debris mitigation. More on this soon.
The majority of the stories are focussed around the traditional domains: climate change, natural disaster and so on. I look forward to see what 2024 brings and whether we can see other applications, as exciting, across spaces including infrastructure, society and economy. There is certainly a promise held in investment programmes such as Space for Infrastructure and the overall growth of public and private sector Satellite Remote Sensing applications!
