Monster European Environmental Satellite

andygood writes: "Spaceflight Now has this article about the 'Mother of All Earth Observation Satellites' which will be launched by Europe in early 2002. This thing is the size of a juggernaut and 'every hour will gather as much data as can be stored on a dozen PC hard disks'. 'ENVISAT' (ENVIronmental SATellite) has been in the works for almost fourteen years with a price tag of 2.3 billion (Euro)."