The Sentinel-2A satellite has been in orbit for only a matter of weeks, but new images of an algal bloom in the Baltic Sea show that it is already exceeding expectations. Built essentially as a land monitoring mission, Sentinel-2 will also certainly find its way into marine applications.

Chilubi Island, Zambia

An astronaut aboard the International Space Station took this photograph of the strange rounded shapes along the coastline of Zambia's Chilubi Island on 14 June 2015. The light-toned sand island stands out from the dark waters of Lake Bangweulu.

Mission managers for NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory have determined that its radar, one of the satellite's two science instruments, can no longer return data. However, the mission, which was launched in January to map global soil moisture and detect whether soils are frozen or thawed, continues to produce high-quality science measurements supporting SMAP's objectives with its radiometer instrument.

The Earth Observation Research Center (EORC) of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has released a new webpage "JAXA Himawari Monitor" showing the colour images and the quicklook images of the geophysical data from the geostationary satellite of Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), Himawari-8.

Once launched and operational NOAA's next generation weather satellite, GOES-R, will provide scans of Earth five times faster at four times the image resolution than previous geostationary satellites.

Researchers at University of La Rioja (Spain) have developed a new method to eliminate artificial satellites in Highly Elliptical Orbits when they finish their mission. The methodology, which allows for a reduction of both cost and risk, has been tested with the European Space Agency INTEGRAL mission, which will re-enter into the Earth's atmosphere in order to disintegrate in 2029.