Science

EARTHCARE

European-Japanese Cloud & Climate Science Satellite · ESA / JAXA

In July 2026, wildfires broke out just west of Madrid — close enough to threaten ESA's own deep-space tracking station at Cebreros. EarthCARE watched them from orbit as they burned, its instruments doing exactly the job they were built for: measuring how the smoke and heat interacted with clouds and radiation overhead in real time. Nicknamed 'Hakuryu' (White Dragon) by JAXA, EarthCARE is the most complex Earth Explorer satellite ESA has ever built — 20 years from first concept to launch, four instruments working together for the first time ever on a single spacecraft, including a radar so sensitive it can measure the Doppler shift of individual cloud particles falling through the atmosphere. Clouds remain the single largest source of uncertainty in every climate model on Earth; EarthCARE exists specifically to shrink that uncertainty, one wildfire, one storm system, one measurement at a time.