Italy’s IRIDE Earth observation programme has added seven more satellites to its Hawk for Earth Observation (HEO) constellation, enhancing the strategic data it provides for Italy’s environmental, emergency and security services.

A constellation of four new satellites has been launched for Greece, marking a world first for a national satellite capability dedicated to wildfire detection and tracking. The mission is the result of cooperation between the Greek government, private satellite company OroraTech and the European Space Agency (ESA), supported through the EU-funded Recovery and Resilience Facility.

Thirteen European satellites on the same rideshare launcher have successfully reached orbit, bringing capabilities to Italian and Greek monitoring programmes as well as CubeSats that will test satellite connectivity.

Week in images: 27 April - 01 May 2026

Discover our week through the lens

The Copernicus Sentinel-1D satellite, launched last November, is now fully operational after successfully completing its critical in-orbit commissioning phase.

With all four Sentinel-1 satellites having now been deployed, this achievement marks a major milestone for this flagship radar mission – a journey that began more than a decade ago and that has helped pave the way for the future of Earth observation.

What did space deliver for Europe this month? From the Moon to low Earth orbit and beyond, here’s what the European Space Agency has been up to.

The sudden loss of satellite communications would lead to widespread disruption, affecting vital services such as air travel, maritime logistics and emergency response with an estimated economic impact of up to €20 billion. To highlight the economic importance of satellite-enabled connectivity, London Economics prepared a report for the European Space Agency (ESA), examining the effects of a hypothetical week-long outage of satellite communications across ESA Member States and Canada.

Watch ESA’s Mars chief engineer Albert Haldemann explain the sterilisation process of one of the parachutes of the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover mission and why it matters.  

Carefully wrapped inside a donut-shaped bag is a 35-m diameter parachute, about to be baked inside a specialised dry-heat steriliser oven. The parachute needs to be at least 10 000 times cleaner than your smartphone. 

To get rid of any microbes it might have picked up during its time on Earth, the parachute was heated up in a specialised oven at the European Space Agency’s Life Support and Physical Sciences Laboratory at ESTEC, the agency’s technical centre in the Netherlands. All air inside the cleanroom continuously passes through a two-stage