A new processing tool has been developed to bundle information contained in large amounts of satellite data, paving the way for the wealth of Copernicus Sentinel satellite data to be more easily incorporated into online environment-monitoring services.

Timbuktu

The Flock constellation captured this view of Timbuktu on 5 March 2017. This famous city is situated on the edge of the Sahara Desert in Mali.

The satellite was little (the size of a small refrigerator), only supposed to last one year and constructed and operated on a shoestring budget — yet it persevered. After 17 years of operation, with more than 1,500 research papers generated and more than 92,000 images captured from each of its imagers, the Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite has exceeded expectations in its technology, research goals and longevity.

Climate change, with all its ecological and economic implications, is one of society's greatest challenges. It is imperative that we develop efficient strategies and derive measures to protect our sensitive climate system on a global scale. In order to do this, we must gain a profound understanding of the complex environmental processes that contribute to climate change. Atmospheric researchers from the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) have recently made an important contribution to this.

Oil spills, such as those from the Erika (1999) and the Prestige (2002) tankers, result in huge environmental and economic damage to our coastlines.

After almost 20 years of service - a remarkable feat, given its expected lifetime of five years - a series of manoeuvres will be carried out to take the Meteosat-7 satellite out of its current geostationary orbit, 36,000km above the Earth, to its new and final resting place.