Copernicus

Assembled from 18 blocks · 2 evidence · 14 related

1. Story
2. The European Union's Earth observation programme, and the largest single supplier of free satellite data in the world. Its Sentinel satellites are purpose-built for specific measurements — Sentinel-1 for all-weather C-band synthetic aperture radar, Sentinel-2 for multispectral land imaging, Sentinel-3 for ocean and land monitoring — and the first of them, Sentinel-1A, launched in April 2014. The programme's data and information policy is free, full and open: anyone may access and redistribute the data for any purpose, commercial use included, without licence fee. That policy is the reason the European downstream analytics sector exists in the form it does, and it is also a permanent ceiling on any commercial operator proposing to sell medium-resolution optical or radar imagery in the same bands. Copernicus is funded as public infrastructure on the same logic as a meteorological service — the argument being that the value accrues in agriculture, insurance, shipping, forestry and civil protection rather than in the sale of the pixels.
3. Knowledge
4. Earth observation
5. Copernicus
6. Connections
7. Landsat
8. Earth observation
9. Sentinel-1A launches and Copernicus data becomes free and open
10. Satellite communications
11. Copernicus
12. Planet Labs
13. ERTS-1, later Landsat 1, begins the civil land-imaging record
14. The United States opens the Landsat archive at no charge
15. Sentinel-1A launches and Copernicus data becomes free and open
16. Evidence
17. Establishes that Copernicus Sentinel data is made available free, fully and openly, including for commercial reuse. V55 verification basis: the regulations were not retrieved in this session and their numbers are deliberately omitted rather than cited from memory; the policy substance is stated from author knowledge.
18. Supports the finding that GNSS downstream revenue — devices, chipsets and services — runs to hundreds of billions of euros a year while Earth observation data and services revenue is smaller by roughly two orders of magnitude. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; the contrast in magnitude is stated, the current-edition figures are not.