Study and monitoring of the Earth at various levels

ENVISAT – (Environmental Satellite) was an ESA Earth Observation mission, and was active for 10 years. The satellite was the successor of the two ERS satellites, and was launched on March 1st, 2002, from the spaceport in Kourou, French Guyana, aboard an Ariane 5 carrier. It remained active until April 8th, 2012, the day when the communication with the ground-based stations stopped; on May 9th, 2012, after several attempts to re-establish contact and identify the reasons behind the lack of reaction by the satellite, the ESA declared the end of the mission.  

ENVISAT was placed in a sun-synchronous polar orbit, at a distance of nearly 790 km from Earth, and had been designed to study and monitor the environment of the Earth at various levels: local, regional and global. Specifically, the goals of the satellite were: monitoring of the resources of the Earth (both renewable and non-renewable), study of the structure and dynamics of the Earth’s crust and the internal part of the planet and support to already active weather services. The fields where the data captured by the satellite provided a significant contribution are: climatology, meteorology, atmospheric chemistry, hydrology, protection of the environment, of the soil and the plant cover.

ENVISAT had a suite of 9 on-board instruments; some of them were advanced versions of those that came with ERS-1 and ERS-2, such as the AATSR advanced radiometer (Advanced Along Track Scanning Radiometer) and the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR). 

Same as it happened with ERS-1 and ERS-2, the ASI was also involved in this mission for the processing of the data acquired by ENVISAT by the I-PAF and I-PAC facilities, located by the Geodesy Centre of the Italian Space Agency in Matera.

‣ News

THURSDAY 31 AUGUST 2023

The catalogue of PRISMA acquisitions is now freely available on GEOSS portal ‣

The catalogue data is updated daily MORE...

FRIDAY 09 SEPTEMBER 2022

PRISMA for extraction of Fire Fuel Maps ‣

A new image by PRISMA MORE...

FRIDAY 29 JULY 2022

PRISMA for extraction of Fire Severity Maps ‣

The prototypal processor “Fire Severity Map” was developed in the framework of the ASI-funded project “Sviluppo di Prodotti Iperspettrali Prototipali Evoluti MORE...

FRIDAY 15 JULY 2022

PRISMA for Retrieval of Vegetation Indicators ‣

The PRISMA image, a 30 km x 30 km spotlight acquisition, was processed within the ASI project " Sviluppo di Prodotti Iperspettrali Prototipali Evoluti  MORE...

FRIDAY 01 JULY 2022

PRISMA for Chlorophyll Concentration Retrieval of Inland Waters ‣

PRISMA captures the Varese Lake MORE...