Earth observation by satellites provides essential datasets for a wide range of commercial, societal and scientific applications. Satellites have been observing the state of the environment since the launch of the radiation balance instrument on Explorer 8 in October 1959, and over the last 60 years the range of observation types and applications has grown exponentially. Today operational long-term sustained Earth observation programmes, exemplified by the Copernicus Sentinels, give a wide range of users reliable environmental information services.

SMOS has shown the importance of achieving low level of noise floor and side lobes for best image quality in aperture synthesis radiometry. One key factor is the similarity between element patterns. During the TRP study on Super-MIRAS a solution was proposed based on dummy elements. This activity includes the following tasks : - To build of a representative part of an aperture synthesis radiometer at L-band with a conventional ground plane and with the proposed dummy element technique. - To measure of the patterns of the active elements.

The main aim of OPTIMAL was to perform a feasibility study on a potential mission or system to detect marine plastic litter through satellite remote sensing. To do so, the project activities involved the following aspects:

A number of upcoming or planned Earth Observation missions (e.g. Sentinel 3, MTG, Post-Metop, Premier etc.) require cryogenic cooling between 80 and 50K. To obtain this level of temperature, it is now common to use long life mechanical coolers (e.g. Stirling Coolers for Sentinel 3 and Pulse Tube cooler for MTG) which are most of the time redundant. Operational missions requiring to be Single Point Failure tolerant, the cryogenic system has to be sized taking into account a OFF redundant cooler. This introduces a large parasitic heat load in the order of the actual user load.

This study focused on the synergistic retrieval of cloud information from active and passive observations. While this synergistic approach is well established for precipitation, it is used less for clouds.

The Arctic Mission System Study involved two parallel studies conducted by consortia led by OHB Sweden and Thales Alenia Space. The scope of the studies were to identify needs in the Arctic region that could be met with mission architecture containing space elements, to propose such mission architectures, to define the elements of one of the architectures in some detail and to propose a plan to implement it.

With the launch of the first Sentinel satellites, a new era in Earth observation has started that allows for the development of new approaches that use these novel observations at high temporal frequencies and fine spatial resolution with complementary information from the optical and microwave spectral domains. One very important application for is the monitoring of crops.

The objective of the Aeolus/EarthCARE Aerosol Assimilation Studies (A3S) project was to allow assimilation of the Aeolus L2A lidar backscatter data, also paving the way for the assimilation of EarthCARE products. Since the Aeolus and EarthCARE missions were not yet launched at the time of the study, demonstration datasets based on model data (MOCAGE model for the aerosols and the IFS for the clouds) and a one-day dataset based on CALIPSO data (reprocessed at the UV wavelength and with the Aeolus orbit data) was created.