Earth science community wants more Earth Explorers Following the
Call for Ideas for the next Earth Explorer Core missions, a
total of 24 proposals had been submitted by the deadline in
August. This clearly shows that there is massive interest from
the scientific community in ESA's Living Planet Programme and
that Earth Explorers are providing the community with a host of
new tools to forward their scientific agenda. Earth Explorer
missions are designed to address critical and specific issues
that have been raised by the science community whilst
demonstrating breakthrough technology in observing techniques.
The science community is involved right from the beginning in
the definition of new missions, which leads to the efficient
development of a mission and provides the exact data required by
the user. Currently, there are six approved Earth Explorer
missions under development: CryoSat, GOCE, SMOS, ADM-Aeolus,
Swarm and EarthCARE. CryoSat will be the first of these missions
to launched, with lift-off scheduled