Published on 27 May 2020
Plentiful parked airliners at Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi, usually the busiest airport in India until the COVID-19 pandemic, as seen by ESA’s oldest operational Earth observation mission, Proba-1.
The cubic-metre-sized satellite has been in orbit for more than 18 years. It left Earth from India: Proba-1 was launched from the country’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre by Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle on 22 October 2001.
The first in ESA’s family of ‘Project for On-Board Autonomy’ missions, Proba-1 began life as a technology demonstration satellite, subsequently becoming an Earth observation mission. Its main hyperspectral Compact High Resolution Imaging Spectrometer is accompanied by the monochromatic High Resolution Camera, which took the 5-m spatial resolution image shown above.