EE12 User Consultation Meeting

Welcome to the ESA's Earth Explorer 12 (EE12) User Consultation Meeting (UCM) webpage.

Since the successful launch of the first Earth Explorer in 2009, this family of satellite missions continues to surpass expectations demonstrating breakthrough space technologies and observing techniques to deliver an astounding range of scientific findings about Earth system and climate processes.

To date, there are 11 Earth Explorers. Two, GOCE and Aeolus, have already completed their missions, while SMOS, CryoSat, Swarm, EarthCARE and Biomass to are in orbit currently. FLEX is set to launch this year, and FORUM, Harmony and the recently selected WIVERN mission are in various stages of development. 

Building on the success of previous mission, there are four candidates currently competing to be the twelfth Earth Explorer: CryoRad, ECO, Hydroterra+ and Keystone.

As a critical part of their selection process, a User Consultation Meeting (UCM) will be held on 7 - 8 July 2026 in Tallinn, Estonia, where the four concepts will be presented to the Earth observation scientific community by their respective scientific and technical teams. UCM participants have the unique opportunity to learn about each mission concept, ask questions and to provide critical feedback on each mission, which is important input for the recommendation and decision-making process that will ultimately lead to the selection of up to two candidates to proceed to the next stage of development.

We invite you to register and participate in the EE12 UCM to learn more about the process behind the selection of ESA’s Earth Explorer research satellite missions.

Please note, we encourage physical attendance to stimulate active participation and interaction.

The deadline for registration is Monday, 15 June 2026.

Each of these innovative candidate missions aims to provide valuable insights into various aspects of our Earth system. A brief introduction to each candidate mission is provided below:

CryoRad would target polar regions and their poorly understood processes, namely the acceleration of ice sheet mass loss, the reduction of sea-ice thickness and the freshening of the Arctic Ocean. The mission would, for the first time, provide low-frequency passive microwave measurements from 0.4 to 2 GHz with an unprecedented spatial resolution that allows the estimation of critical geophysical variables such as ice-sheet temperature profiles down to the bedrock.

ECO aims to deliver the first direct measurements of Earth’s Energy Imbalance (EEI), the fundamental driver of our climate. Since the industrial revolution, the balance between incoming solar radiation and the Earth’s radiation has been disrupted by the emission of greenhouse gases. Using a unique satellite constellation combining Sun and Earth radiometers, and wide-field visible and infrared imagers, ECO would resolve the global radiation budget, benchmark Earth system models, constrain climate trajectories, and provide timely objective evidence to steer climate action.

Hydroterra+ would be placed in geostationary orbit, which is innovative for an Earth-science radar mission. From this fixed position above the equator, the satellite’s C-band synthetic aperture radar would deliver data products multiple times a day over Europe, the Mediterranean and northern Africa to understand rapid processes tied to the water cycle over land and to extreme events in these regions.

Keystone aims to explore the region of the atmosphere which goes from 50km to 250km, with a unique, ambitious and novel approach. It would deliver pioneering observations of atomic oxygen with collocated observations of other trace gases, temperature and wind, using a novel combination of limb-sounding techniques across the Terahertz, infrared and UV-visible spectral domains. By characterising this data-sparse region chemical composition and thermal balance, Keystone would significantly advance whole-atmosphere chemistry-climate system understanding and improve estimates of satellite drag.