Sentinel-5 is a European Earth observation mission developed to support the European Commission Copernicus Programme for monitoring the earth.

The Sentinel-5 mission consists in a single instrument which is a UV-VIS-NIR-SWIR spectrometer observing the earth in nadir mode with a wide swath. It is embarked as a Customer Furnished Item (CFI) on the MetOp-SG A satellite (illustrated in Figure 1) which is operated by EUMETSAT as part of the EPS-SG (EUMETSAT Polar System Second Generation) system.

The main objective of the Sentinel-5 mission is to perform atmospheric measurements, with high spatio-temporal resolution, relating to air quality, climate forcing, ozone and UV radiation and providing a daily global coverage.

Figure 1: Illustration of the MetOp-SG A spacecraft carrying the Sentinel-5/UVNS instrument.