Europe Sentinel-2A Satellite Delivers its First Images of Earth

Climate Change, Anthropocene, & Associated Issues

Date posted: 03/12/17

With a swath width of 290 km, the first acquisition began in Sweden and made a strip-like observation through central Europe and the Mediterranean, ending in Algeria. The data were relayed in real time to Italy Matera ground station, where teams eagerly awaited their arrival for processing. While northern and central Europe were mostly cloudy, Italy typical sunny weather allowed the teams to get their first glimpse of the multispectral instrumental capabilities over the northwestern part of the country and the French Riviera, and they were excited by what they saw. With a ground resolution of 10 m per pixel, the images show individual buildings in Milan, agricultural plots along the Po River, and ports along the southern French coast. This new satellite will be a game changer in Earth observation for Europe and for the European Copernicus program, said Philippe Brunet, Director for Space Policy, Copernicus and Defense at the European Commission. The Director of ESA Earth Observation Programs, Volker Liebig, commented that Sentinel-2 will enable us to provide data for the program land monitoring services and will be the base for a wide spectrum of applications reaching from agriculture to forestry, environmental monitoring to urban planning. The multispectral imager is being calibrated during the commissioning phase, which will take about three months to complete, but the quality of these first images already exceeds expectations. In addition to demonstrating the imagers high resolution, these initial data also foreshadow the mission land-monitoring applications in areas such as agriculture, inland and coastal waters and land-cover mapping. The imager has 13 spectral bands, from the visible and the near infrared to the shortwave infrared at different spatial resolutions, take land monitoring to an unprecedented level. In fact, Sentinel-2 is the first optical Earth observation mission of its kind to include three bands in the red edge.