NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) successfully launched from California at 9:02 a.m. EDT Saturday, embarking on its mission to measure the ice of Earth's frozen reaches with unprecedented accuracy.

Hurricane Florence, North Carolina

This 1 km Proba-V image captures Hurricane Florence over North Carolina on 15 September 2018, a day after the category one storm made landfall in the United States.

The first all-British radar satellite has launched to orbit on an Indian rocket.

Called NovaSAR, it has the ability to take pictures of the surface of the Earth in every kind of weather, day or night.

Making landfall in the US state of North Carolina on 14 September, Hurricane Florence is causing widespread damage and flooding. The Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar mission is being used to map affected areas.

Arianespace announced today that it will orbit THEOS-2, the very-high-resolution Earth observation optical satellite for Thailand, under the terms of a turnkey contract between Airbus Defence and Space and the Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency of Thailand (GISTDA).

There are more than 4,800 satellites orbiting Earth. They bristle with sensors – trained towards Earth and into space – recording and transmitting many different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation.