Following their successful launches in 2025, two new Copernicus satellite missions, Sentinel-1D and Sentinel-5A, have returned their first images, representing important progress in the EU’s capacity to monitor the planet’s surface and atmosphere.

Following its launch on 4 November 2025, Copernicus Sentinel-1D has delivered its first images. Among these is this radar image acquired on 7 November 2025, showing northern Germany. The false colour visualisation of the image highlights different types of land cover such as cultivated fields, water bodies, and urban areas, including the cities...

Copernicus Sentinel-5A has delivered its first images after its launch on 13 August 2025, marking a significant milestone in the monitoring of air quality from space. The Sentinel-5 mission provides observations of key air pollutants, essential climate variables, and stratospheric ozone, which is the protective layer shielding life on Earth...

On 23 November 2025, the Hayli Gubbi volcano in Ethiopia, located approximately 800 kilometres north-east of Addis Ababa, erupted for the first time in nearly 12,000 years.  As a result of the eruption, a large sulfur dioxide (SO₂) plume was emitted into the atmosphere. This image, derived from data acquired by the Copernicus Sentinel-5P...

Every autumn, as temperatures fall and daylight hours shorten across Japan, the country enters its annual kōyō season, when the combination of reduced sunlight and cooler temperatures triggers the transition of tree leaves from green to autumnal reds and browns.  This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image from 17 November 2025 shows widespread autumn...