Live coverage: Two satellites blast off on Ariane 5

Two months after its foggy blastoff from California on a Falcon 9 rocket, a $364 million oceanography satellite has returned the first data from its radar altimeter mapping global sea levels, catching this year’s ongoing El Niño in the act.

With a second radar surveillance satellite already returning images less than three days after launch, managers in charge of Europe’s growing fleet of Sentinel environment-monitoring spacecraft will grapple with an immense ‘Big Data’ challenge as the multibillion-dollar program enters a new phase.

A three-man crew departed the International Space Station on Sunday, concluding more than five months aboard the orbiting research complex and heading for landing in Kazakhstan. Undocking of the Soyuz MS-07 spacecraft occurred at 0916 GMT (5:16 a.m. EDT), and the trio landed on the Kazakh steppe at 1239 GMT (8:39 a.m. EDT).