Over 30 years of archived data from the US Landsat Earth-observing satellites are now available, free of charge. The majority of these products are unique to ESA’s archive and have never before been accessible anywhere else by the scientific user community.
In its archives, ESA holds around two million products that cover Europe and North Africa. The total amount of data available is worth about 450 terabytes – that’s equivalent to about 900 000 hours of audio recorded at CD quality.ESA has been acquiring Landsat data at European stations since the 1970s.
“The missions were the main data source for many years during the 1980s when Earth observation started at ESA’s ESRIN centre in Italy,” said Gunther Kohlhammer, Head of the Ground Segment Department.
ESA revised its Earth observation data policy in 2010 to adapt to the ‘Joint Principles for a Sentinel Data Policy’. This policy was approved by ESA Member States participating in the GMES Space Component Programme, and supports the concept of providing free and open access to data.
By revising the data policy, ESA followed the same path as the US Geological Survey, who began making its Landsat data available free of charge in 2009. Read More
