At an event held on 13 December at ESA's Headquarters in Paris, France, an Understanding for the Sentinel Collaborative Ground Segment Cooperation was signed to facilitate Sentinel data exploitation in Romania.
Copernicus, the world's biggest and most successful Earth observation programme is run by the European Commission, ESA and EUMETSAT, proving what Europe can achieve when it stands together.
The Sentinel family of satellites are designed to meet the operational needs of the Copernicus environmental monitoring programme.
ESA and the Romanian Space Agency (ROSA) have a close and fruitful cooperation, which includes joint activities in the area of Earth observation. These activities started before Romania became an official ESA Member State.
Romania, as an Eastern European country, plays a key role in maintaining a European-wide balanced approach to our activities.
Under the agreement, ROSA will coordinate ground segment activities in Romania - such as hosting, distributing, ensuring access and archiving Sentinel data - and act as an interface between ESA and national initiatives. ROSA also plans to cooperate with different European partners and institutes.
The data provided by the Sentinel missions are used primarily for Copernicus Services, but these free and open data are also used by scientists and others worldwide.
The Sentinel Collaborative Ground Segment is intended to allow complementary access to Sentinel data and/or to specific data products or distribution channels. The collaborative elements bring specialised solutions to further enhance the Sentinel missions' exploitation in various areas, such as data acquisition and (quasi-) real-time production, complementary products and algorithms definitions, data dissemination and access, development of innovative tools and applications as well as complementary support to calibration and validation activities.
