Tribune. Satellites have been used for environmental monitoring since the 1980s. While the main Earth observation programs until then were predominantly American, the European Union struck a blow by launching the program. Copernicus, which is the most ambitious project to date for monitoring our planet from space. There is currently a fleet of eight European satellites in orbit called the Sentinel, which relentlessly photograph the Earth in multiple wavelengths and at a hellish rate.
At the genesis of the program, the European Commission wanted access to Sentinel data to be “Total, open and free” to maximize the use of data for the benefit of society. In other words, the program is a public service financed by taxes from Europeans. But that does not prohibit – on the contrary – the creation of commercial services backed by this data.
This position was not obvious at the turn of the XXIe century when the alternative economic model (the user buys the images) was often favored by space agencies in Europe. In total, the European Union has invested 8 billion euros in this program from 2008 to 2020.
Data deluge
This choice paid off since the Copernicus program is a success. In 2019, the Copernicus data distribution platform had almost 300,000 registered users. The distributed data has enabled many scientific and technical advances for the monitoring of climate, water resources, ecosystems or natural disasters such as fires, floods and earthquakes.
Sentinel images are used more and more often by the media, as with this recent survey by the World on Chinese military expansion. Commercial or free services have emerged in the field of advanced agriculture in particular. Finally, the observations and knowledge generated by these satellites irrigate our societies and have undoubtedly contributed to strengthening environmental awareness.
One caveat, however, is that the European Commission did not sufficiently anticipate the challenges of distributing this deluge of data. Every day, Sentinel satellites produce 12 terabytes of data. From the launch of the first Sentinels, the data access points set up by the European Space Agency were severely tested.
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