ESA

ESA, the European Space Agency, is the intergovernmental agency of 22 member states that develops and operates Europe’s space missions, with headquarters in Paris and a major Earth-observation center, ESRIN, in Italy. It builds the Sentinel satellites that supply the Copernicus program, operates the radar altimeter mission CryoSat-2 launched in 2010 for sea-ice and ice-sheet thickness, and ran ERS and Envisat. ESA also flies the SMOS sea-surface-salinity mission and the GOCE gravity mission. Its altimetry, scatterometer, and radiometer data underpin sea-ice, sea-level, ocean-color, and wind products used across operational oceanography.