10 Years Operational Global VEGETATION Monitoring (1998-2008): What's next?

For 10 years, the VEGETATION mission has played an important role in meeting the need for information on the state of our planet offering the international community high quality data from a truly global Earth Observing System, which uniquely acquires data of the entire terrestrial surface on a daily basis.

Today, the VEGETATION instruments are still going strong and we are pleased to celebrate their 10th anniversary during a 2-day conference.

This conference will be a forum where data users, scientists, system engineers, environmental managers and policy makers can meet. It wants to look back at the past by commemorating the operational achievements yet at the same time intends to map the way ahead, with a VEGETATION follow-on mission and Sentinel 3 taking over.

The VEGETATION Programme offers :

• Earth observation sensor on board of the SPOT satellite
• Daily coverage of the entire earth at a spatial resolution of 1 km
• Ready to use high quality remote sensing imagery available to end-users in near-real time
• Up-to-date information for decision makers to optimise policies for resource management and environmental monitoring
• A joint programme of Belgium, the European Commission, France, Italy and Sweden