For more than 18 months, engineers have been carefully piecing together the many components that make up ESA's Sentinel-3A satellite. Now hosting an array of instruments to provide a wealth of information about Earth's oceans and land, the satellite is complete, standing proud for testing.
For more than 18 months, engineers have been carefully piecing together the many components that make up ESA's Sentinel-3A satellite. Now hosting an array of instruments to provide a wealth of information about Earth's oceans and land, the satellite is complete, standing proud for testing.
Scheduled for launch at the end of 2015, Sentinel-3A is set to play a key role in Europe's Copernicus programme.
As one of the fleet of missions built for the world's largest environmental monitoring initiative, Sentinel-3A will join Sentinel-1A and Sentinel-2A in orbit.
The Sentinel-1A radar satellite was launched last April and the multispectral imaging Sentinel-2A will be launched next spring.