Level-2 News
FLEX and Sentinel-3C launched [link]
ESA’s FLEX and Copernicus Sentinel-3C launched together on 15 September. FLEX will measure the faint fluorescence emitted by plants during photosynthesis, combining its observations with Sentinel-3 data to study plant health, productivity and environmental stress.
Three Earth Explorer candidates go forward [link]
ESA has selected ECO, Keystone and CryoRad for further study as candidates for its twelfth Earth Explorer mission.
Italy’s IRIDE completes Eaglet II constellation [link]
IRIDE now has 39 satellites in orbit, including the complete 24-satellite Eaglet II constellation, whose spacecraft combine multispectral imaging with AIS reception for tracking ships.
ESA awards contracts for Europe’s EOGS blueprint [link]
ESA has awarded ICEYE and Leonardo separate studies for a proposed end-to-end EOGS (Earth Observation Governmental Service) architecture. The concept combines EU-owned capacity, member-state assets and commercial services for security and crisis response.
California to integrate ICEYE data into statewide emergency operations [link]
The agreement gives all California state agencies access to ICEYE’s flood and wildfire services, including 24/7 monitoring, with information shared with local emergency managers to identify affected communities and assess damage. Cal OES has already used the services during multiple incidents since February.
Planet opens Berlin facility for Pelican production [link]
Planet has opened a new 5,700 m2 satellite manufacturing facility in Berlin, designed to double its Pelican production capacity, with manufacturing expected to begin this autumn.
EnduroSat raises $205 million [link]
EnduroSat has raised $205 million (€178 million) to expand satellite manufacturing in the US and Europe, bringing funding announced by five European NewSpace companies in September to approximately €1.03 billion.
Two more StriX satellites launched [link]
Rocket Lab launched Synspective’s 12th and 13th StriX satellites from New Zealand on 19 and 26 September, adding to the Japanese company’s synthetic aperture radar constellation for infrastructure monitoring, urban planning and disaster response. Both spacecraft will undergo testing and commissioning over the coming months before entering service.
Developer's Orbit
Element 84’s Geospatial Tech Radar 2026 [link]
Element 84’s 2026 Geospatial Tech Radar shares the team’s assessment of geospatial tools, standards and techniques, covering AI chat interfaces and agents, cloud-native tooling, and provenance — tracking where data and answers come from.
On-orbit geospatial foundation-model execution [link]
Researchers reduced a geospatial foundation model to roughly one-sixteenth of its original size while retaining broadly comparable performance across five Earth observation tasks. They then ran the compact model aboard the ISS’s IMAGIN-e payload using preloaded imagery.
OpenTopography’s new raster DEM STAC catalog [link]
OpenTopography’s new STAC catalog enables programmatic discovery and access to global and high-resolution regional elevation datasets stored as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs. Two open-source Jupyter notebooks, ready to run in Google Colab, demonstrate partial raster reads, hillshade generation and interactive map-based discovery with dataset metadata and citations.
DestinE MLOps Studio beta [link]
Destination Earth’s MLOps Studio is available in beta, providing a managed Kubeflow environment connected to its Data Lake for building, deploying and monitoring machine-learning pipelines. Users need a dedicated access role.
Data
New AVIRIS-5 airborne hyperspectral data [link]
NASA’s ORNL DAAC has released AVIRIS-5 datasets spanning calibrated radiance, surface reflectance and greenhouse gas enhancements from several airborne campaigns. Surface reflectance and its uncertainty are available as netCDF files for vegetation and mineral analysis, while methane and CO2 enhancement products come as cloud-optimised GeoTIFFs with per-pixel uncertainties.
Landsat-derived cropland intensity, first CONUS release [link]
NASA’s LP DAAC has released Version 1 of LGCIP30_CONUS, mapping cropland intensity using Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 data for the nominal year 2020. The dataset is available through Earthdata Search, with this initial release covering the contiguous United States and additional regions planned for future products.
FireSense airborne spectral campaign data [link]
NASA’s ORNL DAAC has released new FireSense datasets, including atmospheric profiles, soil and vegetation moisture measurements, and MASTER (MODIS/ASTER Airborne Simulator) imagery to support wildfire research and model validation.
GEDI L4A v3 biomass correction for South American forests [link]
The GEDI team has corrected a model error affecting Level 4A Version 3 aboveground biomass density estimates for evergreen and deciduous broadleaf forests in South America. A corrected data product will be released.
Landsat MSS historical brightness values corrected [link]
USGS has reprocessed approximately 44,000 Landsat 2 and 3 MSS Collection 2 Level-1 products to correct gain and offset errors affecting brightness values in Bands 4 and 5. The update also fixes excessive cloud masking in around 1,700 products, so users working with affected scenes should check the processing dates in their product identifiers and download the corrected versions.
AgroFusion links field photos with satellite time series [link]
AgroFusion pairs 211,483 LUCAS field observations from 2018 and 2022 with geotagged photos, land-cover and land-use labels, and monthly Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 pixel time series across Europe. Weather, terrain and soil data, along with AlphaEarth embeddings, accompany the observations.
Snapshots
The Beaver Brown Waters of Rupert Bay [link]
Rivers draining boreal forests and wetlands carry coloured dissolved organic matter into Canada’s Rupert and Hannah bays, creating dark, tea-brown waters that mingle with lighter plumes of suspended sediment stirred up by tides and currents.
Interesting reads
EarthCARE’s view of volcanic plume boosts air safety [link]
EarthCARE observed the plume from Anak Krakatau’s September eruption, combining vertical and horizontal measurements to distinguish ash and clouds relevant to aviation routing.
EarthCARE tracks wildfire smoke’s effect on sunlight. [link]
EarthCARE is revealing how smoke from Canadian wildfires reduces the sunlight reaching Earth’s surface. By combining multispectral imagery with atmospheric lidar, the mission helps scientists connect the visible smoke plumes with their effects on solar radiation.
Climate
Faster-flowing glaciers fuel decades of polar ice loss [link]
The new IMBIE record extends to 1972 for Greenland and 1979 for Antarctica, combining altimetry, gravimetry and ice-discharge estimates from successive mission generations. It reports 11.3 trillion tonnes lost from 1979 to 2023, with faster glacier flow responsible for most of the combined loss.
El Niño Alters Marine Life in the Pacific [link]
NASA’s PACE satellite observed substantially lower chlorophyll concentrations in the central equatorial Pacific in June 2026 than a year earlier, as strengthening El Niño conditions suppressed nutrient-rich upwelling. Its hyperspectral measurements will help researchers study how different phytoplankton communities respond.
Copernicus Ocean State Report: tenth edition [link]
The tenth Copernicus Ocean State Report brings together satellite observations, measurements at sea and ocean models to document changes in the global ocean. Among its findings, Mediterranean surface waters warmed by 0.32°C per decade between 1982 and 2024, and 2024 recorded the most marine heatwave days in the 2002-2024 study period across all three detection methods examined.
Other chapters explore changes in phytoplankton bloom timing and how SWOT observations improve the detection of ocean eddies. Read the report or browse the illustrated summary.
From Spectral Reflectance
The Morning Backscatter
The Spectral Reflectance Newsletter is not always a quick read, so I started The Morning Backscatter as a shorter and lighter companion for the morning: one news item, one useful link, one visual, and one funny-ish item from the EO world.
There is no mailing list; new issues are published via GitHub Releases, and instructions on how to follow along are available in the repository README.
The Morning Backscatter: https://morningbackscatter.space/
GitHub repo: https://github.com/xen0f0n/morning-backscatter