ESA and the German Aerospace Center have signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a state-of-the-art optical data relay terminal to be flown on the Sentinel-2 satellite. The Sentinel satellites – numbered from Sentinel-1 to Sentinel-5 – will form the core of the European Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) programme. In order to meet the user requirements, DLR will provide the Optical Communication Payload (OCP) – a new capability to download large volumes of data from the Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 Earth observation satellites via a data relay satellite directly to the ground. Read More