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
Go to topicThank you for liking
You have already liked this page, you can only like it once!
Building a satellite is a complex business and the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission is certainly no exception. The detailed engineering drawings have been translated into a faithful animation of Sentinel-3 revealing its instrumentation. The animation reveals the beauty of this new satellite and offers a glimpse inside, including the ocean and land colour instrument, the sea and land surface temperature radiometer, the synthetic aperture radar radiometer and the microwave radiometer. This suite of state-of-the-art instruments will provide systematic measurements of Earth’s oceans, land, ice and atmosphere to monitor and understand large-scale global dynamics and provide critical information for ocean and weather forecasting. The Sentinel-3 instruments build on heritage from ESA’s Envisat and CryoSat satellites. The satellite was designed and built by a consortium of around 100 companies under the leadership of Thales Alenia Space.