ESA Proba-V: The Wide-eyed Probe will track global vegetation

The small but powerful camera of ESA’s Proba-V mission can fit on a single laboratory table for testing. But when it reaches orbit, this compact sensor will deliver a daily overview of virtually all vegetation growth across Earth.

Daily global monitoring is an ambitious enough goal for a full-sized mission, but Proba is ESA’s smallest satellite platform – smaller than a cubic metre.

The aim is to have a microsatellite doing an equivalent job to the wide-swath ‘Vegetation’ camera on France’s full-sized Spot-5 satellite. But engineers needed to shrink it by a factor of ten, swapping glass lenses for lighter aluminium mirrors and combining three separate telescopes.

To read more click on this link to the ESA PROBA-V site