To celebrate the launch of its new satellite into space, the European Space Agency (ESA) commissioned Fabrica, the design and research department of Benetton under the direction of Sam Baron, to create a short video about our life on Earth and our relationship to outer space. A team of Fabrica researchers used satellite images from ESA’s archive depicting landscapes and distant space objects and creatively combined them with textures from animals, materials and humans as a way to show that the distant and unknown has more in common with our immediate surroundings than we might think.

ESA’s new satellite is called Sentinel-2B, and is the second of a pair of satellites set to orbit the Earth and provide images for environmental monitoring purposes. Due to be launched on March 7th, the new satellite will orbit the planet every 10 days, and will fly at the modest altitude of 786 kilometres. With a sleepless eye turned to our planet, the Sentinel mission will constantly record changes on the landscape with extreme precision, and help assess natural phenomena and anomalies; for example, the earlier Sentinel 2 mission helped discover a dangerous crack on the Antarctic ice shelf last month, which prompted the evacuation of a manned research facility nearby.