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ESA extends Envisat satellite mission

5 June 2009

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Launched in 2002, Envisat is the largest Earth observation satellite ever built.

Credits: ESA

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ESA’s global land cover map was generated using 19 months worth of data, collected between January 2005 and June 2006, from Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument. It is the highest resolution land cover map that has been completely validated ever released.

This map may be used freely with mandatory credits going to ESA/ESA GlobCover Project, led by MEDIAS France/Postel.

Credits: ESA - MEDIAS France/Postel

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An Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) interferogram interpretation by Italy’s Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV). The large green square represents the Mw 6.3 main shock, the smaller green squares represent the Mw > 5 aftershocks and the black triangles represent GPS stations used for SAR validation. The yellow line east of L’Aquila shows the location of a ~4 km–long alignment of co-seismic surface breaks observed in the field by INGV researchers. This alignment corresponds to a northwest - southeast strip where the spatial fringe rate seems to exceed the limit for interferometric correlation. This may indicate that the fault dislocation reached, or was very close to, the surface along this line. The observed pattern of ground displacement is in very good agreement with the earthquake source mechanism (the ‘beach ball’), confirming that the earthquake source is a normal fault striking 144 degrees (clockwise from north), and dipping to the southwest.

Credits: INGV