The lead spacecraft in Europe's new multi-billion-euro Earth observation (EO) programme is built and ready to go into orbit.

Musa Bay, Iran

The Advanced Land Imager aboard NASA's EO-1 satellite acquired this view of Musa Bay, in Iran, on 20 January 2015.

Like a cowboy at a rodeo, NASA's newest Earth-observing satellite, the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), has triumphantly raised its "arm" and unfurled a huge golden "lasso" (antenna) that it will soon spin up to rope the best soil moisture maps ever obtained from space.

New research by a team from the University of Leicester, the Hungarian Academy of Science and others shows how water quality can be checked from satellite images.

The German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) and the United Nations University (UNU) have agreed to continue to strengthen their cooperation. Johann-Dietrich Wörner, Chairman of the DLR Executive Board, and Jakob Rhyner, Vice Rector of UNU in Europe and Director of the UNU Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) in Bonn, signed an agreement to this effect on 23 February 2015.

According to Euroconsult's newly released research titled Prospects for the Small Satellite Market, a total of 510 small satellites, or SmallSats (meaning nanosats, cubesats, microsats and minisats) are to be launched in the next five years, a two-third increase in the average number of SmallSats per year versus that of the past decade.