Earth Cam!

Sentinel-2a, EU’s latest Earth observer is now operational.

16:38 04 December 2015

EU’s Sentinel colour Earth camera, which was launched in June, is now operational. Because of EU’s free and open data policy, anyone is free to download its images of the planet following a short registration procedure. 

 

Sentinel’s pictures will be primarily used by scientists to track everything from the growth of megacities to the variable yields of the world’s most important food crops while researchers will use them in climate studies.

 

The European Space Agency (Esa) expects the demand for the pictures to be huge. Thousands of users have already registered to make Sentinel downloads although most of them are more interested in the more complex radar pictures being produced by Sentinel-1a, which is another spacecraft in the series.

 

Prof Volker Liebig, the director of Earth observation at Esa, said: "We expect the demand for all Sentinel data to be unprecedented. It is already unprecedented for us; we've never had so many downloads,"

 

"It's hard to put a number on what it will be for Sentinel-2a, but it will be in petabytes, for sure."

 

One petabyte is roughly equivalent to 200,000 commonly used DVDs.