All data from the European earth observation program Copernicus should be available in one place in the future. This “Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem” is now being set up. One of the project partners is T-Systems, the company currently manages the 34 petabytes of data in its data centers. Overall, it is expected there that the data collection will even grow to 80 petabytes in the coming years. The German Aerospace Center is also involved in the consortium, which, according to its own statements, brings the German Satellite Data Archive (D-SDA) into the project.
Europe leading worldwide
The Copernicus program currently includes eight satellites, named Sentinel and numbered. Overall, they are grouped into six core groups. They continuously collect data on the earth’s surface, the oceans, the atmosphere and climate change. The data is freely available on the Internet, as are the regularly taken satellite images with a resolution of 10 m. According to T-Systems, there are currently more than 600,000 registered users, and they and the public should also be able to access the new portal. This can already be seen, by July a large part of the planned offer should be included.
The new portal is intended to make old and current data “directly and easily available to all interested parties,” assures DLR. The main targets are public institutions, but also researchers, companies and private individuals. The European Space Agency ESA, which is responsible for Copernicus, has been a world leader in collecting and making available earth observation data for years. Not even the US space agency NASA does anything comparable. The data is primarily useful for environmental protection, climate monitoring, agriculture and time and again for help after natural disasters.
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