The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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As football fans worldwide keep their eyes trained on Brazil, ESA’s Proba-V minisatellite captures the entire country in a single image.
The Andean Plateau, or Altiplano, of neighbouring Bolivia, including Lake Titicaca and the giant Salar Uyuni salt flat, are visible towards the scene’s western edge.
Proba is smaller than a cubic metre but its view spans a mighty 2250 km. It reveals details 300 m across but the central part of the image is sharper – down to 100 m – as demonstrated in the right-hand image, which shows a detail of the River Negro joining the mighty River Amazon.
Proba-V is a miniaturised ESA satellite tasked with a full-scale mission: to map land cover and vegetation growth across the entire planet every two days.
The camera’s continent-spanning field of view collects light in the blue, red, near-infrared and mid-infrared wavebands, ideal for monitoring plant and forest growth as well as inland water bodies.
Proba’s images are processed and distributed to hundreds of scientific end users by VITO, Belgium’s Flemish Institute for Technological Research, extending the coverage of previous generations of the Vegetation camera flown on the Spot-4 and Spot-5 satellites.