A satellite barely bigger than a washing machine and launched just two months ago has already made this great map of the world's vegetation. (Click on it for a higher-resolution version.)

The Belgian-built satellite called Proba-V is the latest in the European Space Agency's PROBA series of small satellites and will take over vegetation monitoring duties from the Spot-4 and Spot-5 satellites, which are at the end of a 15-year mission.

Proba-V will circle the Earth 14 times a day, covering the entire globe every two days with its 100-meter resolution camera. Every 10 days, a new 200,000 megapixel image of the world's vegetation will be produced.

ESA is still recovering from the sad loss of its Envisat mission, which unexpectedly lost contact last year after 10 years of collecting amazing images of Earth from space. This new little guy should tide ESA over while they build their new Earth-observing Sentinel 3 satellites, the first of which is scheduled to launch next year.

Images: ESA