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.