PARIS (ESA PR) — ESA has awarded a contract worth €160 million [$168.5 million] to Airbus in the UK to build the Earth Explorer FORUM satellite. This exciting new mission will yield unique insight into the planet’s radiation budget and how it is controlled – thereby filling in a critical missing piece of the climate jigsaw.

Short for Far-infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring, FORUM is ESA’s ninth Earth Explorer mission.

BONN, Germany (ESA PR) — GHGSat, a leader in high-resolution greenhouse gas monitoring from space, has officially joined ESA’s prestigious Third Party Mission Programme. Announced today at the Living Planet Symposium currently taking place in Bonn, data from the company’s fleet of commercial satellites will be provided, free of charge, to researchers working in the fields of Earth science and climate change. Users will be able to access greenhouse gas measurements from sites all around the world.

Through ESA’s Third Party Missions Programme, ESA allows high quality data from a wide range of Earth observation satellite missions developed and operated by other agencies to be accessed to the wider scientific community. The programme, which has been operating for over 45 years, includes over 60 instruments on more than 50 space missions.

Leveraging the world’s largest synthetic aperture radar constellation, ICEYE will provide ESA with active flood hazard data before, during and after large-scale flood events

HELSINKI (ICEYE PR) — ICEYE, the global leader in satellite driven persistent monitoring and an expert in natural catastrophe solutions, today announced the start of a pilot activity with the European Space Agency (ESA) to support the Copernicus Emergency Management Services (CEMS) team with flood insights. Through the pilot, ICEYE will deliver critical flood impact information showing the extent and depth of flooding at the structure level to ESA and CEMS throughout 2022. The pilot will allow CEMS to evaluate ICEYE’s flood insights and explore potential applications.

WASHINGTON (NASA PR) — Continuing the collaboration that produced the COVID-19 Earth Observing Dashboard in 2020, NASA and its international partners in Europe and Japan have combined the collective scientific power of their Earth-observing satellite data in expanding the online resource to document a broad array of planet-wide changes in the environment and human society.

PARIS (ESA PR) — A contract signed with Arianespace secures the launch for the third Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite. Scheduled to lift off on ESA’s new Vega-C rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana in the first half of 2023, Sentinel-1C will continue the critical task of delivering key radar imagery for a wide range of services, applications and science – all of which benefit society.

PARIS (ESA PR) — As of today, ESA has appointed three new Directors – for Commercialisation, Industry and Procurement, Earth Observation Programmes and Navigation. The new Directors were appointed by ESA Council at its meeting on 21 October; they will support the Director General with responsibility for activities and overall objectives in their respective directorates.