Nebula Public Library

In this report, we describe the advisory study for both the Asteroid Impact Monitoring (AIM) as a stand-alone European mission and for AIM with its second component, the US Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission under study at NASA by the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Water resources management has become a challenging problem worldwide, especially in developing countries. The lack of information on land cover monitoring has a huge impact on the water resources management, since it may hamper the collection, treatment and distribution of water for human consumption and agricultural development. To fulfil this demand, Earth Observation (EO) data has been used in African countries to map land cover of large and often inaccessible areas, providing useful information on qualitative and quantitative land cover changes.

Performance of nanosatellite systems is reaching a level sufficient for supporting Earth Observation applications, while instrument development focuses on miniaturization. By using a multitude of cooperating and cost effective satellites, nanosat technology could be a serious competitor for conventional EO missions

While most Earth Observation missions based on passive optical methods are intended to measure the light “reflected” by the surface, FLEX uses a completely innovative approach based on the measurement of the light “emitted” as fluorescence by terrestrial vegetation. Such fluorescence emission by vegetation has never been measured from space, which makes FLEX a true Explorer mission providing a type of information never available before.