Copernicus

node · earth · European Union

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.