The EU’s Sentinel-2A is now spinning almost 800 kilometres above our heads, after launching from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana on Tuesday, as the latest satellite in the multi-billion-euro Earth observation programme, Copernicus.
Sentinel-2A’s high-powered cameras have a 290 kilometre-wide field of view, enabling it to deliver images of Earth with an unprecedented level of detail and accuracy. The satellite will scan the Earth’s land surface once every 10 days for seven years.
In addition to monitoring the growth of crops, the satellite will be used to map changes in land cover and to monitor the world’s forests. It will also provide information on pollution in lakes and coastal waters. Images of floods, volcanic eruptions, and landslides will contribute to disaster mapping and helping humanitarian relief efforts.
“Copernicus provides more precise and reliable information about our environment and European citizen’s security,” said Elżbieta Bieńkowska, Commissioner for Internal market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs. “And the availability of full, free and open satellite observation data is already today allowing innovative entrepreneurs to create new applications and services in Europe.”
The launch is, “Fantastic news for ecology and conservation,” said Nathalie Pettorelli, editor-in-chief of the journal Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation.
A complementary satellite, Sentinel-2b, will launch in the autumn of next year. Airbus won the contract to build the two Sentinel-2 spacecraft via awards from the European Space Agency (ESA), the operational lead on the programme, in 2008 and 2010 respectively. The satellite was launched using instrumentation developed by Arianespace SA worth €710 million.
After some 16 years in gestation, the €7.5 billion Copernicus programme environmental monitoring programme, which is jointly run by the European Commission and the ESA, sent the first of a constellation of satellites into space last year.
Capturing the data
On the ground, the Copernicus project has invested in large computer storage and processing facilities. Up to 2.5 terabytes of raw data, roughly 300,000 times the capacity of the average home computer, is beamed down every day from the Sentinel 1-A to stations located in Matera, Italy, Maspalomas, Spain, and Svalbard, Norway.
This year the satellite returned images of the deadly earthquake in Nepal. A research team including Norut in Norway, Dutch-based PPO.labs, Leeds University in the UK, the Polish Geological Institute and the Geological Survey of Norway used the data to produce detailed maps.
All the data and images captured by the satellites are free for anyone to use. Among the possibilities for commercial products are flood forecasting models, iceberg mapping systems and enhanced weather prediction models.
The Sentinel series
The Sentinel mission has been designed and built by a consortium of over 40 companies led by Airbus, and supported by the CNES French Space Agency.
Altogether, there will be six families in the series. The first satellite, Sentinel-1a, was launched in April last year.Launches of the satellites will be conducted throughout this decade and into the 2020s. Sentinel 3 will go up later this year from Plesetsk in northern Russia, and 4, 5 and 6 later this decade.
- Sentinel-1: Radar satellite that can see the Earth's surface in all weathers
- Sentinel-2: Multi-wavelength detectors to study principally land changes
- Sentinel-3: Tuned to observe ocean properties and behaviour
- Sentinel-4: Meteorological sensors to measure atmospheric gases
- Sentinel-5: Low-orbiting atmospheric sensor to monitor air quality
- Sentinel-6: Measure sea-surface heights
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