Education Activities in the frame of the Earth Observation Programme of ESA

Earth Observation (EO) from satellites is increasingly important for the understanding of the Earth’s system and its processes, especially within the context of climate change.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is an international organization consisting of 18 Member States developing and executing space programmes in cooperation with European industry. In the area of EO, after the first successful launch of Meteosat in 1977, ESA designed, developed and launched a series of meteorological satellites, including Meteosat Second Generation and METOP (all operated by EUMETSAT). In 1991, ESA launched its first EO satellite with a synthetic aperture radar payload, ERS-1, followed by ERS-2 (1996) and Envisat (2002), the former being the largest EO satellite ever launched and with a variety of different sensors for the observation of land, ocean, cryosphere and atmosphere. Data issued by ERS-2 and ENVISAT payload are presently transferred to ground stations, collected and distributed worldwide to around 1200 scientific teams, as well as to an increasingly larger number of operational and commercial users.

On top of these, ESA is preparing some scientific Earth Observation missions called Earth Explorers, dedicated to the study of scientific challenges identified by the science community. GOCE (measuring the Earth's gravity field), SMOS (determining soil moisture and ocean salinity), CryoSat (observing continental ice sheets and marine ice cover) are the next satellites of this series.

Other important issues are the observation and fast response in case of natural disasters and all environmental hazards. In this context, GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security), a joint initiative of the European Space Agency ESA and the European Union, aims to monitor the state of the environment on land, at sea and in the atmosphere and to deliver policy-relevant EO information that can be used to improve the security of the citizens. The success of this initiative will be achieved largely through a well-engineered Space Component for the provision of Earth-observation data to turn into services for monitoring the environment and supporting civil security. This Space Component comprises five types of new missions called Sentinels, so-called Contributing Missions from Member States and other organisations, with their associated Ground Segment infrastructure, developed by ESA specifically to meet the needs of GMES. The Sentinel missions include radar and super-spectral imaging for land, ocean and atmospheric monitoring. The first three Sentinels are currently under industrial development, with Sentinel-1 planned to launch in 2011.

Associated to this challenging programme of Earth Observation, ESA is carrying out a programme of EO Education, in cooperation with other national space agencies and with international bodies, like UNESCO or the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) and its Working Group for Education. In this frame, dedicated tools for schools, such as Eduspace, have been developed with the objective to create awareness about the potential of Earth Observation from space among young generations and to bring ‘space’ closer to youngsters. A variety of different tools have been developed and a series of training courses at different levels (university, post-doc, scientific or professional-oriented) are provided by ESA and other institutes cooperating with ESA.