With liftoff slated for May on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, EarthCARE has been going through the last round of tests and meticulous checks in Germany.

Now ready to be declared fit to travel, the two-tonne EarthCARE satellite has been standing proud on display in a cleanroom at Airbus’ facilities in Friedrichshafen.

ESA’s EarthCARE Project Manager, Dirk Bernaerts, said, “It’s great to see EarthCARE in all its glory and I’m extremely proud of what ESA, JAXA and our industrial partners have achieved in developing this extraordinary mission.

“As a hugely complex mission, it has been a rather long road, but it now comes at a critical time in the development of global climate models that are starting to resolve cloud convection at kilometre scales – we talk about it now being ‘the age of convection’.

“EarthCARE is certainly poised to make an important contribution to complicated climate models and numerical weather prediction.”

ESA’s Director of Earth Observation Programmes, Simonetta Cheli, commented, “EarthCARE will soon add to our growing family of pioneering Earth Explorer research missions. So far, all these missions have exceeded their scientific goals and expectations – and I fully expect EarthCARE will follow suit.

“Although EarthCARE is an ESA mission, we pay special thanks to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, which has supplied the cloud profiling radar, one of the satellites key measuring instruments.”

JAXA’s Vice President, Koji Terada, added, “Despite the mission being proposed as concept over 20 years ago, EarthCARE is more relevant than ever. I am deeply impressed that the mission is based on such excellent and visionary science requirements. We are very proud to offer the cloud profiling radar for the mission.”