Sentinel-2

Sentinel-2

Model of a Sentinel 2 satellite
Manufacturer	Airbus Defence & Space Boostec Jena-Optronik SENER
Operator	European Space Agency
Applications	Land and sea monitoring, natural disasters mapping, sea ice observations, ships detection
Specifications
Spacecraft type	Satellite
Constellation	2
Design life	7 years
Launch mass	1130 kg
Dimensions
Power	1.7 kilowatts (1,700 W)
Production
Status	Active
Built	1
On order	2
Launched	1
Operational	1
Maiden launch	Sentinel-2A 23 June 2015
Last launch	Sentinel-2B End of 2016
Related spacecraft
Subsatellite of	Copernicus Programme
← Sentinel-1 Sentinel-3 →

Sentinel-2 is an Earth observation mission developed by ESA as part of the Copernicus Programme to perform terrestrial observations in support of services such as forest monitoring, land cover changes detection, and natural disaster management. It consists of two identical satellites, Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-2B.

Overview

The Sentinel-2 mission will have the following capabilities:

• Multi-spectral data with 13 bands in the visible, near infrared, and short wave infrared part of the spectrum
• Systematic global coverage of land surfaces from 56° S to 84° N, coastal waters, and all of the Mediterranean Sea
• Revisiting every 5 days under the same viewing angles. At high latitudes, Sentinel-2 swath overlap and some regions will be observed twice or more every 5 days, but with different viewing angles.
• Spatial resolution of 10 m, 20 m and 60 m
• 290 km field of view
• Free and open data policy

To achieve frequent revisits and high mission availability, two identical Sentinel-2 satellites (Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-2B) are planned to operate simultaneously. The planned orbit is Sun synchronous at 786 km (488 mi) altitude, 14.3 revolutions per day, with a 10:30 a.m. descending node. This local time was selected as a compromise between minimizing cloud cover and ensuring suitable Sun illumination. It is close to the Landsat local time and matches SPOT's, allowing the combination of Sentinel-2 data with historical images to build long-term time series.

Launch

The two satellites will work on opposite sides of the orbit. The launch of the first satellite, Sentinel-2A, occurred 23 June 2015 on a Vega launch vehicle. Sentinel-2B will be launched in mid-2016.

Instruments

The Sentinel-2 satellites will each carry a single multi-spectral instrument (MSI) with 13 spectral channels in the visible/near infrared (VNIR) and short wave infrared spectral range (SWIR).

This MSI imager uses a push-broom concept and its design has been driven by the large 290 km (180 mi) swath requirements, together with the high geometrical and spectral performance required of the measurements.

Applications

File:SENTINEL2A Plovdiv 20151206.jpg

Sentinel 2A image over Plovdiv, 06 December 2015

Sentinel-2 will serve a wide range of applications related to Earth's land surface and coastal zones.

The mission will mainly provide information for agricultural and forestry practices and for helping manage food security. Satellite images will be used to determine various plant indices such as leaf area chlorophyll and water content indexes. This is particularly important for effective yield prediction and applications related to Earth’s vegetation.

As well as monitoring plant growth, Sentinel-2 can be used to map changes in land cover and to monitor the world's forests. It will also provide information on pollution in lakes and coastal waters. Images of floods, volcanic eruptions and landslides contribute to disaster mapping and help humanitarian relief efforts.

Examples for applications include:

• Monitoring land cover change for environmental monitoring
• Agricultural applications, such as crop monitoring and management to help food security
• Detailed vegetation and forest monitoring and parameter generation (e.g. leaf area index, chlorophyll concentration, carbon mass estimations)
• Observation of coastal zones (marine environmental monitoring, coastal zone mapping)
• Inland water monitoring
• Glacier monitoring, ice extent mapping, snow cover monitoring
• Flood mapping & management (risk analysis, loss assessment, disaster management during floods)

Products

Sentinel-2's multi-spectral imager undertakes systematic acquisition in a single observation mode.

• Level-1B: Top of atmosphere radiances in sensor geometry. Level-1B is composed of granules, one granule represents the sub-image one of the 12 detectors in the across track direction (25 km), and contains a given number of lines along track (approximately 23 km). Each Level-1B granule has a data volume of approximately 27 MB. Level-1B products require expert knowledge of orthorectification techniques.

• Level-1C: Top of atmosphere reflectances in fixed cartographic geometry (combined UTM projection and WGS84 ellipsoid). Level-1C images are a set of tiles of 100 sq km, each of which is approximately 500 MB. These products contain applied radiometric and geometric corrections (including orthorectification and spatial registration).

• Level-2A: Bottom of atmosphere reflectances in cartographic geometry. This product is currently processed on the user side by using a processor running on ESA’s Sentinel-2 Toolbox. The possibility of making a standard core product systematically available from the Sentinels core ground segment is currently being assessed as part of the CSC evolution activities.

Training data sets

In June 2013, the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) released and distributed training data sets acquired by the SPOT 4 satellite with the same repetitivity as planned for Sentinel-2, to help future Sentinel-2 users develop methods and applications based on multitemporal data. This experiment, named SPOT4 (Take5), was held between February and June 2013, and provided time series over 45 sites for a variety of applications. To obtain this data set, the orbital altitude of SPOT4 was decreased by 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) in order to place it in a 5-day revisit cycle.

This experiment was repeated with the SPOT 5 satellite, thanks to a co-funding from ESA and CNES, between April and September 2015. On this second experiment, 150 sites scattered all over the world have been observed.

The data from both experiments are freely available from the Spot (Take5) experiment site.

External links

• Sentinel-2 at ESA
• Copernicus at ESA
• Sentinel-2 Mission Requirements Document
• Sentinel-2 data sheet
• SPOT (Take 5) data sets