Published on 8 May 2019
On May 7th, our Belgian satellite PROBA-V celebrated its sixth birthday in orbit!
Initially PROBA-V's life expectancy was set to 2.5 years, but the little satellite continues to proudly observe on a daily basis the state of our planet's vegetation.
It has to be said: in the PROBA family longevity is a given. PROBA-V's big brother, PROBA-1, was launched in 2001 with an initial life expectancy of 2 years, but it has broken all records and is still alive and kicking today!
Over the past six years, PROBA-V and its multispectral imager VEGETATION have ensured the continuity of global data after the deorbiting of the SPOT 4 and SPOT 5 satellites in 2013 and 2015. Over 1,600 users from 119 countries have downloaded about 540,000 products, which corresponds with 800 TB (1012 bytes) of data.
This success led to the decision to prolong the PROBA-V mission to March 2020. After that date, the Sentinel-3 satellites will take the baton. In preparation for this transition, the VITO team responsible for treating and distributing VEGETATION products is launching a mini-user survey.
