Sentinel

The Sentinel fleet of satellites is designed to deliver land remote sensing data that are central to the European Commissions Copernicus program. The Sentinel-2 mission is the result of close collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Commission, industry, service providers, and data users. The mission has been designed and built by a consortium of around 60 companies led by Airbus Defence and Space, and supported by the CNES French space agency to optimize image quality and by the DLR German Aerospace Centre to improve data recovery using optical communications. The Sentinel-2 mission consists of two satellites developed to support vegetation, land cover, and environmental monitoring. The Sentinel-2A satellite was launched by ESA on June 23, 2015, and operates in a sun-synchronous orbit with a 10-day repeat cycle. The current Sentinel-2A acquisition priorities are focused primarily on Europe. A second identical satellite (Sentinel-2B) was launched March 7, 2017 and is expected to be operational for data acquisitions in 3 - 4 month. Together they will cover all Earths land surfaces, large islands, and inland and coastal waters every five days. The Sentinel-2 MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI) acquires 13 spectral bands ranging from Visible and Near Infrared (VNIR) to Shortwave Infrared (SWIR) wavelengths along a 290-km orbital swath. The MSI sensor data are complementary to data acquired by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+). A collaborative effort between ESA and the USGS provides for the public access and redistribution of global acquisitions of ESAs Sentinel-2 data at no cost through secondary U.S. based portals, in addition to direct user access from ESA.