Commercial Earth observation (EO) missions are having an increasing impact on urban monitoring, providing detailed observations across multiple data domains to support city planning and tackle urban challenges.

ESA's Third Party Missions programme is continuously working with new providers to grow its collection of commercial missions. This is part of ESA's EO Science Strategy, which highlights the importance of fostering links with the commercial EO market.

The Third Party Missions programme includes several commercial missions that support urban monitoring - such as COSMO-SkyMed, GEOSAT-2, Pléiades Neo, SkySat, and WorldView - and more are expected to join the programme in the future.

Data from these missions are disseminated on a free basis to facilitate scientific and application development activities focused on key areas of urban research, including:

• Pollution detection
• Sustainable development
• Hazard detection
• Heat maps
• Climate models