On-Going and Planned Mission Concept Studies at the European Space Agency for the Preparation of Future Observation Missions in the 2025 to 2027 Timeframe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper presents the status of the on-going and planned mission concept studies in the period 2025 to 2027 in the frame of the ESA's Future Earth Observation Programme (FutureEO). The European Space Agency (ESA) is conducting preparatory activities on innovative Earth Observation (EO) missions to advance in the understanding of the Earth System through research missions, respond to the requirements of the operational users via operational missions and demonstrate in space, following the “NewSpace” approach with CubeSats, onboard innovative and radically new end-to-end remote sensing technologies and concept to boost innovation through the PhiSat missions. ESA's program of EO research missions comprises Earth Explorers (EE), Scouts and Mission of Opportunity (MoO). EE mission's objective is to advance Earth Science by providing answers to key scientific questions on the Earth system relevant to the ESA Earth Science Strategy [1]. Up to now, six Earth Explorers have been launched and another six are in different stages of development, including EE-7, Biomass, whose launch is planned within the first half of 2025. ESA's Earth Explorer 11 mission candidates (CAIRT and WIVERN) are undergoing Phase A activities, ESA's Earth Explorer 12 mission candidates (Cryorad, ECO, Hydroterra + and Keystone) are undergoing Phase 0 activities while preparatory activities to study mission concepts for the Earth Explorer 13 are expected to start in 2027. Scouts are small budget research mission based on small satellites or CubeSats, implemented in three years and complementing Earth Explorers. Scouts are organized in cycles [2], out of the first cycle, one Scout mission (HydroGNSS) is planned to be launched within 2025, and two more missions (NanoMagSat and TANGO) are currently under development. The second Scout cycle is currently on-going, up to 4 mission concepts will be selected in April 2025 to undergo mission consolidation studies prior to a selection for implementation of up to two concepts in the first half of 2026. Missions of Opportunity are research missions implemented under cooperation frameworks with Space Agencies outside Europe and Canada. The Next Generation Gravity Mission (NGGM) [3] [4] is currently undergoing Phase B1. Preparatory activities for operational missions are underway for the next generation of Sentinels in the frame of the Copernicus programme in close coordination with the European Commission. The Phase 0 of the Sentinel-6 Next Generation is currently on-going. Regarding Meteorological missions, preparatory activities are planned in the coming period for the next generation of meteorological missions, particularly Meteosat 4th Generation in close coordination with EUMETSAT. PhiSat missions are CubeSat missions aimed to demonstrate innovative and radically new end-to-end remote sensing technologies and concepts in space, such as PhiSat-1 on board the FSSCat mission [5] and PhiSat-2, which is currently undergoing in-orbit commissioning. Initiation and development PhiSat-3 in the 2026-2027 period is foreseen. Finally, the New Earth Observation Mission Ideas (NEOMI) program aims at fostering the development of blue sky EO mission ideas The activities reported in this paper from 2026 onwards are subject to ESA CMIN25 subscription of Future EO programme.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".