The ECSR holdings of ESA historical publications contains a small physical collection called ISY comprising just six references. The series was published by the ESA Publications Division in 1992 and came to the Archives from different sources within ESA, including the ESTEC Library, ESOC Library, and from individual staff members at HQ.
ISY, the International Space Year, was a worldwide celebration of space cooperation and discovery. It was held in 1992 on the 500th anniversary of the1492 discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus, with the objectives of enhancing international collaboration, enhancing public awareness of the benefits of space activities (particularly Earth observation data for research) and demonstrating the usefulness of space technology for better understanding key environmental problems.
The major European contribution, jointly organised by the Commission of the European Communities, ESA and the German Space Agency DARA, consisted of a one-week conference on Space in the service of the changing Earth, held from 30 March to 4 April 1992 in Munich. This was made up of five different symposia: a central symposium on environment observation and climate change modelling through international space projects; and four smaller satellite symposia dealing with Navigation and Mobile Communications; Image Processing, GIS and Space-assisted Mapping; Space Sciences; and Columbus activities.
The resulting proceedings, the majority of which are in English, were gathered into four ISY publications, with ISY-1 made up of three volumes, hence six large references in total:
- Three volumes of ISY 1 - one for each sub-topic of the central symposium:
- Remote Sensing for Global Change, Climate Change and Atmosphere & Ocean Forecasting (450 pages)
- Remote Sensing for Environmental Monitoring and Resource Management (554 pages)
- Earth Observation Space Programmes, SAFISY Activities, Strategies of International Organisations, Legal Aspects (580 pages)
- ISY 2 – which combined Navigation & Mobile Communications and Image Processing, GIS & Space-assisted Mapping (480 pages)
- ISY 3 – Space Sciences, with particular emphasis on High-Energy Astrophysics (246 pages)
- ISY 4 – Columbus eight (COSY-8), Utilisation of Earth Orbiting Laboratories (415 pages)
The first opening of this digitised collection, in January 2026, comprised vols 1-3 of ISY.
To browse the collection, enter the SHIP database and search for ‘ISY’.
Once you have selected a copy, SHIP’s image viewer allows you to select your preferred viewing mode by clicking the 'image viewer' icon on the right of the top header bar.