Proba-V Mission Status
Mellab, Karim1; Davy, Vrancken2; Francois, Michael1; Santandrea, Stefano1
1ESA, NETHERLANDS; 2QinetiQ Space, BELGIUM

Proba-V is a ESA small satellite tasked with a full-scale mission to map land cover and vegetation growth across the entire planet every two days. Proba-V is the latest in ESA's Proba series of satellites.
The Proba-V project was kicked-off in 2009 with the aim to provide continuity to vegetation data that has been delivered since 15 years by SPOT/Vegetation instrument to growing user communitee.
The development of the Proba-V mission encompassed the satellite platform, the vegetation instrument, the ground control center and the user segment.
Based on a recurrent Proba platform, the challenge was to build an instrument having the same characteristics as the SPOT/vegetation instrument.
All segment of the mission have not reach the acceptance and readiness level. The Proba-V satellite is planned to be lofted in April 2013 on board the new ESA small launcher, Vega.
The launch of the satellite will be followed by a 6 months phase of commissioning of the all the mission elements before hand-over of to the ESA Earthwatch program for its exploitation phase.
This paper will present the mission status including the initial commissioning phase of the satellite, the instrument and the first results of the image quality of the instrument associated with its user segment.