ESA’s Earth Explorer Satellites – Advancing Measurement Capabilities in the Geoscience through the FutureEO Programme.

Measurements and observations are essential to the development and advancement of understanding in the geosciences. Measurements are also critical to the detection and quantification of long term change and short term hazards, at a time when non-stationarity in Earth systems is increasing and extreme events are occurring daily. For many regions and domains however, observational networks are lacking, while the need for information is increasing due to growing human populations, intensifying geopolitical pressures and Earth’s rapidly changing climate.

Through FutureEO, a series of world-class research satellite missions, the Earth Explorers, are realised. Since the successful launch of the first Earth Explorer in 2009, these missions, which are proposed by the scientific community, continue to demonstrate how breakthrough technology can deliver an astounding range of scientific findings about our planet. They lead to the scientific excellence that is critical to addressing the challenges society faces today and is expected to face in the decades to come – from understanding different aspects in the climate system such as atmospheric dynamics and ice melt, to societal issues such as food security and freshwater resources. Importantly, Earth Explorers also provide sound heritage for developing operational missions. For instance, some of the highly successful current suite of Copernicus Sentinel missions and the future Copernicus Sentinel Expansion missions would simply not be possible without the technology and application opportunities demonstrated by the Earth Explorers.

This talk will present the FutureEO programme and its opportunities to advance our measurement capabilities in the geoscience. It will present the family of Earth Explorer satellites and future planned missions, highlighting their scientific goals and objectives. Based on lessons learned it will also discuss the challenges of launching first of its kind measurement systems and related science activities.