What is SMOS?
ESA's Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) Earth Explorer mission is a radio telescope in orbit, but pointing back to Earth not space. Its Microwave Imaging Radiometer using Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS) radiometer picks up faint microwave emissions from Earth's surface to map levels of soil moisture, sea surface salinity, sea ice thickness and others geophysical variable such as wind speed over ocean and freeze / thaw soil state. Read more about this mission in the SMOS multimedia book.
Latest Mission Operations News
New SMOS sea surface wind speed products now available17 April 2020The European Space Agency (ESA), the Institut Français pour la Recherche et l'Exploitation de la MER (IFREMER) and the French company OceanDataLab are pleased to announce a new operational service called "SMOS Wind Data Service" which provides, in near real time (NRT), surface wind speed over the ocean derived from the brightness temperature measurements of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite mission. SMOS data dissemination - Maintenance on 16 January 202014 January 2020A scheduled software maintenance activity will affect the SMOS data dissemination service on Thursday 16 January 2020, from 09:30 to 10:30 CET. There will be no access to the SMOS collections during the indicated downtime. As recently announced, the symposium "Earth Explorers for Climate - The contribution from SMOS" will take place in Cornwall, UK, from 18 to 20 March 2020. Abstract submission and registration interfaces are now both available on the conference website.
Latest Mission Results News
Since the saltiness of ocean surface waters is a key variable in the climate system, understanding how this changes is important to understanding climate change. 
Space is key to monitoring ocean acidification28 November 2019This week, the UN World Meteorological Organization announced that concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have reached yet another high. This ongoing trend is not only heating up the planet, but also affecting the chemical composition of our oceans. Until recently, it has been difficult to monitor 'ocean acidification', but scientists are exploring new ways to combine information from different sources, including from ESA's SMOS mission, to shed new light on this major environmental concern. 
Revealing interior temperature of Antarctic ice sheet04 November 2019As ESA's SMOS satellite celebrates 10 years in orbit, yet another result has been added to its list of successes. This remarkable satellite mission has shown that it can be used to measure how the temperature of the Antarctic ice sheet changes with depth – and it's much warmer deep down.
SMOS 10 years in orbit31 October 2019SMOS has been in orbit for a decade. This remarkable satellite has not only exceeded its planned life in orbit, but also surpassed its original scientific goals. |
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