With liftoff just a few days away, the next Sentinel satellite for the Copernicus environmental monitoring programme is positioned in the launch tower at Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.

Carrying a multispectral camera to image Earth's changing land and vegetation, Sentinel-2B is set for launch on 7 March at 01:49 GMT (02:49 CET; 22:49 local time on 6 March).

It will join its twin, Sentinel-2A, which has been in orbit since June 2015. With them circling on opposite sides of Earth and each providing 290 km-wide coverage, the time it takes to image the globe will be cut in half to five days, and to just three days over Europe.