Belgium's participation in the technological development of remote sensing instruments and missions are either carried out within the framework of its ESA membership or through bilateral collaboration with such countries as France and Argentina.
ESA instruments and missions with a crucial Belgian contribution include the currently operational PROBA-V mission for daily global monitoring of the Earth’s terrestrial cover and the airborne hyperspectral APEX sensor, as well as the future ALTIUS mission for atmospheric sounding.
Via its collaboration with France, Belgium has been an important partner in the SPOT programme since the beginning. This culminated in Belgium hosting the processing, distributing and archiving centre of the SPOT VEGETATION mission. More recently, Belgium contributed to the French Pléiades programme for very high resolution optical remote sensing.