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Three years of Proba, the 'smart' satellite that runs itself

22 October 2004

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Views from Proba's first three years in space:

- Mount Pinatubo volcano, Philippines, 31 December 2003

- Vladivostok, Russia, 11 November 2004

- Flooding in Arles, France, 7 December 2003

- Venice, Italy, 3 July 2004

- The Pentagon in Washington, USA, 27 April 2003

Credits: ESA

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Proba's CHRIS image of Italy's Stromboli volcano. It was acquired by the Proba instrument on 3 December 2003. Stromboli is one of the Aeolian Islands, and stands about 900 metres above the level of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Credits: ESA

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Delhi, capital of India, shown in a detail from a Proba HRC image acquired 4 October 2003. The circular area is Connaught Place, the hub of 'New' Delhi. Within the full version of the image can also be seen the city's 40-metre-high war monument, the India Gate.

Credits: ESA

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Proba HRC image of San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge, USA

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The San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge, as seen in a detail from a Proba HRC image. Completed in 1937, the Bridge has a main span length of 1280 metres. This satellite image was acquired 2 May 2004.

Credits: ESA/AP

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The sediment-heavy waters of the Upper Rhine enter into eastern Lake Constance (Bodensee), seen in a CHRIS image acquired 17 June 2004. This large freshwater lake is located on the Rhine between Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

Credits: ESA

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Proba, Project for On Board Autonomy, demonstrates the potential and feasibility of small satellites for advanced scientific and Earth observation missions.

Credits: ESA

Proba's additional payload

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The giant Arecibo radio telescope, famously built above a sinkhole amongst Puerto Rican forest, as seen in a detail from a HRC image. The dish measures 305 metres across and is made up of almost 40 000 separate panels. Suspended 150 metres above the dish is an antenna platform suspended by 18 individual cables, held by three anchorages. This Proba satellite image was acquired 9 June 2004.

Credits: ESA/AP

About Proba

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This 27 September 2004 HRC image shows clearly the massive aluminium roof of the Hong Kong Exhbition and Conference Centre, perched beside the harbour. This historic local landmark is where China formally regained sovereignty of the colony from the UK in 1997.

Credits: ESA

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The Project for On-Board Autonomy (Proba) is a technology demonstration mission of the European Space Agency.

CHRIS is a push-broom spectrometer capable of imaging up to 200 spectral bands in the visible range. Together with the scanning and manoeuvring capabilities of the spacecraft it supports Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) measurements used in land, sea and atmospheric observations.

Technical Information:
Instrument : Compact High Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (CHRIS)
Date of Acquisition : 07-02-2002
Instrument Features : 3 bands (466nm, 543nm, 641nm) image, 15 m spatial resolution, 768x1010 pixels

Credits: ESA