Europe’s next satellite set for launch

The next satellite of Europe's Copernicus programme is due to launch from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia on 13 October at 11:27 CEST.

The Sentinels are a fleet of satellites designed to deliver the wealth of data and imagery that are central to the European Commission’s Copernicus programme.

Copernicus, the EU’s flagship Earth observation programme, delivers freely accessible data and information, providing users with reliable and up-to-date information related to environmental and security issues.

Sentinel-5 Precursor, also known as Sentinel-5P, is the first Copernicus mission dedicated to monitoring the atmosphere. It will map the entire planet every day. Information from this new mission will be used by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) and Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), run by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), for air quality forecasts and related decision-making.

“Sentinel-5P will provide daily coverage of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), one of the key pollutants, with a much finer spatial resolution than was previously available. It will be able to ‘see’ urban sources much more precisely,” says Vincent-Henri Peuch, head of CAMS.

Sentinel-5P will detect sources that are not accounted for in the air quality forecast models or that are not well quantified, Peuch said. “Thinking about ‘dieselgate’ this is of course very important.”

The data will also underpin the monitoring of changes in the ozone layer over time and follow its recovery process, which is expected to take until the middle of the century.

“Reliable and long time-series are essential for evaluating the climate models that are used to predict how climate will change and the ozone layer will recover,” says Richard Engelen, Deputy Head of CAMS.

The Sentinel-5P mission will play a key role in monitoring and tracking air pollution, to provide the Copernicus ECMWF’s CAMS and C3S services with the raw data they need to help manage the environment, and understand and tackle the effects of climate change.