Bianca Hoersch - Chief Digital Officer European Space Agency

A global 10-daily syntheses PROBA-V global syntheses are used in climate change and vegetation dynamics studies, delivering the knowledge needed to decide upon measures to reduce the human footprint on Earth and to preserve a good living environment.

Small misson - Big impact

Bianca Hoersch

- Chief Digital Officer / former PROBA-V mission manager European Space Agency

“PROBA-V was the right mission at the right time. Launched in 2013, two years ahead of the first Sentinel-2 launch and three years before Sentinel-3, the benefits for the land and vegetation user community were enormous.

PROBA-V was not only extending an already long time series of SPOT-VEGETATION data to fantastic 22 years, but it was also bridging the temporal gap between Envisat and Sentinels. Next to that, the bridging of the spatial gap was an even more important feature: down to 100 m spatial resolution with excellent radiometry and large swath was just the right choice, allowing to cross-calibrate with other land missions, building the link between the past and the present, to prepare the future.

As a Mission Manager during the first five years of PROBA-V, it was truly rewarding to see the wealth of the data and the uptake by an ever growing user community.

The first Mission Exploitation Platform which started off as a small idea soon delivered an unprecedented service, allowing users to turn data into information and knowledge for decisions, the ultimate goal of any space mission.

PROBA-V advanced the understanding in particular of the earth surface and its ever-changing vegetation cover. Time series of 22 years enabled and will continue to enable the user community to measure and highlight changes caused by human impact on our Planet Earth.

A big thanks to all of the PROBA-V users who made these missions complete, and congratulations to the PROBA-V team for its continued efforts to make this small mission a big success!“