How many satellites are orbiting the Earth in 2025?

Following last week, where we talked about the growing satellite broadband constellations, this week we’re looking at the latest update on the number of satellites currently orbiting the Earth. The information in this blog is based mostly on the data … Continue reading

Earth Observation Measures Sea-level Rise

An interesting paper was published this week that provides confidence in the accuracy of oceanic Earth Observation data. An European Space Agency (ESA) funded study led by Howarth et al published the paper ‘Global sea-level budget and ocean-mass budget, with … Continue reading

Heating Up The Arctic

Two interesting articles came out recently about the increase in temperatures in the Arctic, and the impact that this is having on the region and its ecosystems. Firstly, at the end of last month, ESA reported that the Arctic had … Continue reading

Beijing Is Sinking

Last month a paper was publishing in the Remote Sensing journal demonstrating that the city of Beijing is gradually sinking as a result of subsidence. The paper ‘Imaging Land Subsidence Induced by Groundwater Extraction in Beijing (China) Using Satellite Radar … Continue reading

Is This The Worst Global Coral Bleaching Event Ever?

It was announced last week that 93% of the Great Barrier Reef has been hit by coral bleaching due to rising sea temperatures from El Niño and climate change. We first wrote about the third worldwide coral bleaching in October … Continue reading

Sentinel-3 Sets Sail

At 17.57 GMT yesterday (16th February 2016) Sentinel-3 set sail from the Plesetsk Space Centre in Russia, heading for its 814 km sun-synchronous low Earth orbit. Like all the other Sentinel launches, we were at home watching the live feed! … Continue reading

Goodbye HICO, Hello PACE – Ocean Colour’s Satellite Symmetry

Ocean colour is the acorn from which Pixalytics eventually grew, and so we were delighted to see last week’s NASA announcement that one of their next generation ocean colour satellites is now more secure with a scheduled launched for 2022. … Continue reading

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little SAR

Last week ESA released a new synthetic aperture radar (SAR) dataset from NASA’s Seasat mission; nothing unusual in that you might think, except that this data is over 36 years old. As part of its Long Term Data Preservation Programme, … Continue reading

Science won’t be rushed!

Last week scientists presented the most accurate model of ocean currents created to date using data from the GOCE satellite; twelve months after the satellite burnt up on re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere. Immediacy is the standard bearer for the … Continue reading

Rosetta: Extra-terrestrial Observation

Most people will have seen last week’s news about ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft arriving at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and the animated images of the ‘rubber-duck’ shaped object taken from Navigation Camera (NavCam), part of Rosetta’s Attitude and Orbital Control System. The arrival … Continue reading