Video: 00:00:57 Two meteorological missions – Meteosat Third Generation Sounder-1 (MTG-S1) and the Copernicus Sentinel-4 mission – have launched on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral in Florida, US. Both are world-class Earth observation missions developed with European partners to address scientific and societal challenges.   The MTG-S1 satellite will generate a completely new…

Image: A powerful heatwave has been gripping large parts of southern Europe. This image, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission’s Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer on 29 June 2025, reveals the temperature of the land surface.

The Meteosat Third Generation Sounder (MTG-S1) satellite, which is hosting the instrument for the Copernicus Sentinel-4 mission, has been placed inside the nose cone of the Falcon 9 launch rocket and is ready for the scheduled liftoff at 23:03 CEST on Tuesday, 1 July.

Revisit Living Planet Symposium 2025 Watch session replays

ESA Living Planet Symposium concludes today, having brought together more than 6500 people across the Earth observation community. The takeaways include new connections, collaborations, not to mention the revelation of pioneering mission images. As a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s a selection that captures just a few of the many highlights.

ESA’s Living Planet Symposium came to a close today, concluding a week of networking, discussions and meeting of curious, scientific minds.    Today, one of the focal points was thermal imaging instruments, which are critical for monitoring land-surface temperature – and will be carried on upcoming missions such as the upcoming Copernicus Land Surface Temperature Mission.…

Scientists are harnessing data from ESA’s Swarm mission and ground-based instruments to precisely measure the strength and duration of intense upper-atmosphere heating – dramatic ‘hot flushes’ triggered by solar storms that also cause Earth’s tenuous outer atmospheric layers to expand rapidly. This research, funded by ESA’s Earth Observation FutureEO Science for Society initiative, offers crucial…

The fourth day of ESA’s Living Planet Symposium was busier than ever.   Today, ESA signed an agreement on integrating satellite data into global environmental reporting frameworks as part of ESA’s Fundamental Data Records Framework. A contract with the Finnish government and the Finnish Meteorological Institute was signed to establish a calibration and validation ‘supersite’. ESA and…

At the Living Planet Symposium, attendees have been hearing how ESA’s Next Generation Gravity Mission could provide the first opportunity to directly track a vital ocean circulation system that warms our planet – but is now weakening, risking a possible collapse with far-reaching consequences.