Goodbye Envisat

Just weeks after celebrating its tenth year in orbit, communication with the Envisat satellite was suddenly lost on 8 April 2012.

Envisat’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) captured this image on 8 April 2012 at 11:09 GMT. The image was transmitted in X-band to the Santa Maria station in the Azores, Portugal, operated by Edisoft. It shows Spain’s Canary Islands. It is the last Envisat data transmitted via X-band before the communication anomaly.

Credits: ESA/Edisoft

Visit ESA portal to download the Hi-Res image.