PROBA-V

PROBA-V, or PROBA-Vegetation (the V standing for vegetation and not the Roman numeral for 5), is a satellite in the European Space Agency's PROBA series. It was launched in 2013 with a predicted usable lifetime between 2.5 and 5 years.

==Satellite== PROBA-V is a small satellite, assuring the succession of the Vegetation instruments on board the French SPOT-4 and SPOT-5 Earth observation missions. PROBA-V was initiated by the Space and Aeronautics department of the Belgian Science Policy Office. It is built by QinetiQ Space N.V. and operated by ESA and uses a PROBA platform. PROBA-V will support applications such as land use, worldwide vegetation classification, crop monitoring, famine prediction, food security, disaster monitoring and biosphere studies. The mission was originally conceived as a "gap filler" between the SPOT-5 end-of-life (foreseen mid-2014) and the launch of the constellation of the Sentinel-3A and -3B satellites. Due to delays of the Sentinel programme and because some instrument specifications of the Sentinel-3 satellites have meanwhile changed, PROBA-V no longer is a gap filler mission but will assure the continuation of the Vegetation programme as such. The Vegetation, International User Committee (IUC, an independent body consisting of Vegetation users, that provides user feedback and recommendations to the Vegetation Steering Committee) has recommended to foresee a successor mission for PROBA-V, because the current specifications of the Sentinel-3 satellites no longer allow the continuation of the Vegetation products in the long run. This mission is the first full application mission with a PROBA platform and had a very tight development schedule.