An aircraft, equipped with ultra-high-resolution thermal imaging technology has been scouring the agricultural heartlands of Europe this summer as an initial step towards building a proposed new satellite system capable of recording the temperature of Earth’s skin in intricate detail. The instrument on board, called HyTES, is an advanced thermal imager built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It has been surveying agricultural and urban areas in the UK and Italy as part of a joint airborne campaign between ESA and NASA. The results will help provide test data to support the development of the proposed Land Surface Temperature Monitoring mission, which is one of six new missions being considered for Europe’s Copernicus programme. As with the Copernicus Sentinel missions, these new missions are being developed by ESA. This photo graph was taken from the aircraft as it flew over test sites in Italy.