The development of ESA’s Earth Explorer FLEX mission has recently passed a significant milestone: the mission’s all-important, single instrument has been joined to its satellite platform.

This delicate operation was carried out by spacecraft engineers at Thales Alenia Space in Cannes, France, following the delivery of the instrument from Leonardo in Florence, Italy.

FLEX’s fluorescence imaging spectrometer is called FLORIS for short and designed to map vegetation fluorescence around the globe and quantify photosynthetic activity and plant stress.