Existing/Planned collaborative ground segment

Sentinel-1/2/3 - Existing/Planned collaborative ground segment

The Sentinel Collaborative Ground Segment, offered by EU Member States and International partners represents - among others - additional means to access Sentinel data, in addition to the standard access from the Core Ground Segment managed by ESA.

The following platforms have been created to offer data access from different countries:

Austria - National Mirror and EODC

The Austrian Collaborative Ground Segment comprises two parts. The first part includes the Sentinel National Mirror Austria and a Data Hub Relay operated by ZAMG, while the second part is represented by EODC. EODC contributes to the Austrian activities with a global multi-petabyte Sentinel archive that is co-located with EODC's cloud-computing environment and Austria's high performance computer infrastructure (i.e. the Vienna Scientific cluster. EODC's public-private partnership (PPP) model aims to serve multi-national partners and customers from science, the public and private sector. In addition to advanced IT technologies, EODC aims to enable the development of services based on Sentinel data with its experts from the EO sector and its broad collaboration network.


Belgium - Terrascope

BELSPO (the Federal Science Policy Office) has launched Terrascope, the Belgian Collaborative Ground Segment. It takes advantage of existing infrastructure that Belgium built up for the SPOT-VEGETATION and Proba-V missions. Terrascope offers its users the following products and services:

  • Sentinel imagery
  • Information products derived from Sentinel imagery
  • Computing power for third parties to use to generate their own information products

Terrascope aims to be a flexible and dynamic platform which should allow for new developments resulting from collaboration between Belgian partners in dialogue with BELSPO.


Czech Republic

 

The Czech Collaborative Ground Segment (CollGS) is a mirror site which has broadband connectivity to GÉANT, API access and high volume data processing. The Ministry of Transport of the Czech Republic is a guarantor and the operator of the site is CESNET.

The Czech CollGS distributes data from Sentinel-1,2,3 satellites, both the A and B units.  The site hosts a continuous collection of data for the area over the Czech Republic, dating back to 2014 (starting with Sentinel-1) up to the current day , with an increase of about 0.8 TB added to the store per month.  The data is stored on disks.  Upon request, it is also possible for the site to host data covering other geographical areas temporarily.  The site also provides computing capacity for fast data processing for non-commercial use, and a web map application with Sentinel-2 data, which enables users to process the data without needing to download it.  The web app shows elementary on-the-fly calculations like NDVI, SWIR, NDWI etc.  Detailed information about the concrete activities is available on the website, together with the link to data hub. 

The data are currently used by both academic users and the private sector.  By the end of 2019, there were almost 200 registered users, and they mostly downloaded Sentinel 1 data.

The aim for the future is to evolve the existing services, make a more user-friendly environment and to produce a new website which provides information about missions and other updates.  If there is strong interest in accessing Sentinel-5P data for the area over the Czech Republic, an extension of the data store is possible.


France - Sentinel Product Exploitation Platform (PEPS)

The Sentinel Product Exploitation Platform (PEPS), developed by the French space agency, CNES, provides global, systematic, long-term and free distribution of Sentinel products to users worldwide.

CNES, representing France in the agreement signed with ESA on Collaborative Ground Segment initiatives, is aiming at contributing to the definition and implementation of policies in environment and security, fostering industrial development and downstream services, and at meeting expectations from institutional bodies and the scientific community.

The PEPS platform is hosted in the CNES data centre in Toulouse, and interconnects with the RENATER and GEANT networks. It distributes data from Sentinel-1, 2 and 3 satellites for satellite platforms A and B.

PEPS distributes level 1 and 2 products from the entire temporal archive across all the geographic areas acquired. So by the end of 2017, PEPS will have collected some 7 petabytes of data which will be made available to users.

In addition to data access, PEPS offers processing facilities co-located with the data.

The user can take advantage of the following functionalities:

  • Interactive catalogue query using a conventional search mode based on multiple criteria or using a semantic search mode based on keywords
  • Product visualisation
  • Order, download one or more products
  • Subscription to occurrences of defined products

These functionalities are available both interactively and in OpenSearch, an appropriate technology for automated access and processing.

PEPS is user-focused and continuously adapts its application to your needs!

Many developments are underway from simple tools up to more elaborate processing (e.g. retrieving Quick-Look images from a Sentinel-2 tile, displaying full resolution image, viewing an image mosaic of the world etc.); these tools will be placed online as soon as they become available.

Moreover, users selected by CNES will have access to a computing cluster to develop, qualify or perform processing near PEPS data.

CNES will be delighted to assist you.

 


Greece - Hellenic National Sentinel Data Hub

The Hellenic National Sentinel Data Hub disseminates data from Sentinels -1, -2 and -3 over the area of South-Eastern Europe, including the Mediterranean basin, North Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans.

Moreover, the site provides an Umbrella Data Hub service that brings the various Sentinel Hubs all together in a single data access point (the so-called federated access). This tool offers users uniform access to Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3, and Sentinel-5p metadata, by connecting in the back-end to a number of the available Copernicus Sentinel Hubs, while serving the data search results via a front-end catalogue and an Application Programming Interface (API). Last but not least, users of the Hellenic National Sentinel Data Hub are enabled to search and download satellite images from the polar orbit satellites acquired at the BEYOND EO Research & Satellite Remote Sensing Centre of Excellence of the National Observatory of Athens.

More specifically, an X/L-Band acquisition antenna is operated on a 24/7/365 basis to receive EO data from eight different polar orbiting satellites, namely EOS/Terra, EOS/Aqua, SUOMI NPP, NOAA-20, FengYun-3B, NOAA-19, Metop-A, Metop-B. The raw satellite data undergo a routine processing in real time, in order to generate HDF products of higher levels (L1A, L1B and L2) before making them available for users to download.

Detailed information about the Hellenic National Sentinel Data Hub and its services can be found on the main website.

Germany – Copernicus Data and Exploitation Platform – Deutschland (CODE-DE)

The Copernicus Data and Exploitation Platform – Deutschland (CODE-DE) is the German national entry point to the EU Copernicus Sentinel satellite systems, their data products and the products of the Copernicus Services. Beside online data access CODE-DE also offers big data processing on the platform for all users and the deployment of tailored processors for specific users.

CODE-DE is particularly dedicated to grant German entities - administrative bodies and civil services, research organizations or private companies, or even members of the public - fast, secure and easy to use access to data of all operational Sentinel satellites as well as all derived information generated by the Copernicus services.

A continuously updated data catalogue allows access to Sentinel data filtered by time, location and additional metadata information such as cloud coverage. A user-friendly catalog client allows, e.g. a full-resolution browse of Sentinel-2 products. All data can be downloaded from the rolling archive online platforms, where products are typically available covering Germany for 36 months, Europe for 12 months, and global for 1 month. Currently, up-to-date data from Sentinel-1A, -1B, -2A, 2B, -3A, -3B and soon 5P are available online. Furthermore, a reload mechanism based on the long-term archive of D-SDA allows to download each Sentinel-2 Level 1C product via CODE-DE.

The service platform features possibilities to process big data online for all users individually based on already installed Earth observation tool-boxes and processors provided by CODE-DE. Selected users are additionally able to use the online processing power of CODE-DE to deploy customer developed processors and to generate tailored information products even without own computing infrastructures. Furthermore, the connection to CODE-DE by cloud providers is supported with a corresponding VM template.

Questions? Please feel free to contact us: code-de@dlr.de

 

Luxembourg

The Luxembourg Collaborative Ground Segment (LU CollGS) is a mirror site for both Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 products.

Developed under the umbrella of the Luxembourg Space Agency (LSA) within the Luxembourg national space programme LuxIMPULSE, it is hosted in the LSA Data Center. The objective is to accelerate the development of value-added applications and services using Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 products, thus facilitating the uptake of the data by end users.

The users can search, discover and download the products. To this end, all products are referenced and indexed in a real time updated geo-catalogue. The catalogue allows the users to search and discover products on the basis of specific criteria such as product type, orbit, cloud coverage or polarisation mode and to select the discovered products for download.

The LU CollGS is continuously growing: as per mid October 2020, it consists of 27.7 Million (M) of products for a total volume of 21.9 petabytes (PB) and makes available to the users the full collection of Sentinel-2 products (22.4 M and 12.4 PB) and continuous time series of Sentinel-1 products from October 2016 until now (5.3 M and 9.5 PB). The Sentinel-1 collection is expected to be completed by November 2020. For both missions (Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2) the LU CollGS makes available all product types on a worldwide coverage basis.

The primary technical features are the following:

  • Full collection of Sentinel-1 (under completion) and Sentinel-2 data: all product types and worldwide coverage;
  • Full disk archiving policy allowing all data to be immediately accessible for download;
  • Connected to GEANT Network;
  • Two levels of download service (standard and premium) via multiple interfaces;
  • Standard download via basic http protocol (limited to 1Gbps);
  • Premium HTTP download via http protocol (limited to 5Gbps) and APIs;
  • FTP download (premium, 10GBps bandwidth available);
  • Bulk retrievals (premium) via ftp (10Gbps).

For more information do not hesitate to get in touch with LSA and pay a visit to the LSA Data Center

website.  

 

Portugal

The IPSentinel - "Portuguese infrastructure for storing and providing images of Sentinel satellites" is a Copernicus Sentinel Collaborative Ground Segment initiative that allows free and open access to data from the Copernicus Sentinel satellites over Portuguese territory, including the area of responsibility for search and rescue in the Atlantic.  IPSentinel is executed through a close partnership between the Directorate-General for Territory (DGT) and the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere (IPMA), promoted by the Direção-Geral de Política do Mar (DGPM) through the European Economic Area Financial Mechanism (EEA Grants).  This initiative is part of Portugal's policy of actively participating in the European Earth observation programme  Copernicus, and in the Copernicus Sentinel Collaborative Ground Segment (CollGS).

IPSentinel is based on ESA's Data Hub Software (DHuS), which is available in open source.  At present, it is possible to download from the IPSentinel portal data from the Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 satellites over the territory of Portugal and its rescue area in the Atlantic .  IPSentinel also allows a fast access to Sentinel-1 satellite data received by the Santa Maria Ground Station collaborative station in the Azores, managed by EDISOFT.  Data from this collaborative station is available in near real time from IPSentinel, which is in general sooner than the non-time critical processing available from ESA's open data hub.


Sweden

The Swedish National Space Agency is now (2019) developing a National Space Data Lab together with Lindholmen Science Park, Research Institutes of Sweden AB and Luleå University of Technology.

The aim is to offer easy methods for analysis of Copernicus data and other space data based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the lab will also offer a data cube based on the Open Data Cube project.

Go to

Key Resources