The Copernicus Sentinel-1D satellite, launched last November, is now fully operational after successfully completing its critical in-orbit commissioning phase.

With all four Sentinel-1 satellites having now been deployed, this achievement marks a major milestone for this flagship radar mission – a journey that began more than a decade ago and that has helped pave the way for the future of Earth observation.

What did space deliver for Europe this month? From the Moon to low Earth orbit and beyond, here’s what the European Space Agency has been up to.

The sudden loss of satellite communications would lead to widespread disruption, affecting vital services such as air travel, maritime logistics and emergency response with an estimated economic impact of up to €20 billion. To highlight the economic importance of satellite-enabled connectivity, London Economics prepared a report for the European Space Agency (ESA), examining the effects of a hypothetical week-long outage of satellite communications across ESA Member States and Canada.

Watch ESA’s Mars chief engineer Albert Haldemann explain the sterilisation process of one of the parachutes of the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover mission and why it matters.  

Carefully wrapped inside a donut-shaped bag is a 35-m diameter parachute, about to be baked inside a specialised dry-heat steriliser oven. The parachute needs to be at least 10 000 times cleaner than your smartphone. 

To get rid of any microbes it might have picked up during its time on Earth, the parachute was heated up in a specialised oven at the European Space Agency’s Life Support and Physical Sciences Laboratory at ESTEC, the agency’s technical centre in the Netherlands. All air inside the cleanroom continuously passes through a two-stage

To mark the first anniversary of the European Space Agency’s Biomass satellite, we present a selection of striking images captured over the past 12 months, revealing Earth’s forests, and much more, in new detail. In just one year, this pioneering mission has begun transforming our understanding of forest dynamics and advancing how scientists monitor the critical role forests play in regulating the global carbon cycle.