On 18 March, the European Space Agency ESA and the UK Space Agency have signed an arrangement at ESA’s Headquarters in Paris, that establishes access to data from the Sentinel satellites, marking a significant step in their exploitation.
The agreement aims to facilitate Sentinel data exploitation in the UK. The UK Space Agency will coordinate ground segment activities in the UK – such as hosting, distributing, ensuring access and archiving Sentinel data – and act as an interface between ESA and national initiatives. This will be done through a ‘national mirror site’ at the Harwell Science, Innovation and Business Campus in Oxfordshire, where ESA’s space applications centre, ECSAT, is also based.
The Sentinel-2 mission will provide ‘colour vision’ for Europe’s Copernicus environment monitoring programme, with data being used to monitor plant health, changing lands, inland water bodies, the coastal environment and support disaster mapping.
