A false-colour image of Italy, as seen in infrared by ESA’s Proba-V minisatellite, with vegetation shown in red, mountain area in red–brown and built-up areas as green.

Proba-V is a miniaturized ESA satellite (launched on 7 May 2013) smaller than a cubic meter with the objective to map land cover and vegetation growth across the entire globe every two days.

Its three cameras record light in the blue (0.44 to 049 mm), red (0.61 to 0.70 mm), near-IR (0.77 to 0.91mm) and SWIR (1.56 to 1.63 mm) at 300 m resolution and down to 100 m resolution in its central field of view.

Credit: Rosario Quirino Iannone