The Sentinel satellites are built primarily to deliver information for environmental services through Europe's Copernicus programme, but they will also be used to advance our scientific understanding of Earth. Paving the way for easy scientific exploitation, ESA has released three new open source scientific software toolboxes.

Each toolbox provides users with a comprehensive set of tools for using data products from Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3.

Developed by software companies in Europe and Canada, the toolboxes are based on sound heritage, but also offer innovative technologies for analysing, processing and visualising data.