Meteosat-1 was launched in November 1977. Placed in geostationary orbit at 0 degrees longitude, it provided a permanent field of view over most of Europe, the whole of Africa, the Middle East and the eastern half of South America - in total over 100 countries.

During the first eight years, ESA’s initial Meteosat system fulfilled its mission to the complete satisfaction of meteorologists and scientists working in climatology and atmospheric physics. However, the focus of ESA programmes was on exploring new space applications. Financing and running the operational systems that resulted from ESA experimental programmes had to be carried out by specialised operators, and, for this reason, an intergovernmental European conference in 1981 sought ways of financing an operational Meteosat programme. A dedicated organisation was set up for this purpose and Eumetsat’s (the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites) convention came into force on 19 June 1986.

Following the successful commissioning of the MSG series, ESA and Eumetsat are already developing the next European operational geostationary meteorological satellite system in the form of the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) to enable Europe to meet its obligations to the Global Observing System. MTG will revolutionise weather forecasting and environmental monitoring as we now know them, by providing a very significant improvement over the capabilities of the previous Meteosats. The first satellite, the Meteosat Third Generation Imager-1 (MTG-I1), was launched on 13 December 2022.