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India joins Europe’s satellite data sharing pool
Context
India has joined Europe’s mega global arrangement of sharing data from earth observation satellites, called Copernicus
What has happened?
An agreement between European Commission and ISRO means data from a band of Indian remote sensing satellites will be available to the European Copernicus programme, while designated Indian institutional users will in return get to access free data from Europe’s six Sentinel satellites and those of other space agencies that are part of the programme, at their cost
How shall it help India?
Under this arrangement, the European Commission intends to provide India with free, full and open access to the data from the Copernicus Sentinel family of satellites using high bandwidth connections
What will India have to share with EC?
Reciprocally the Department of Space will provide the Copernicus programme and its participating states with a free, full and open access to the data from ISRO’s land, ocean and atmospheric series of civilian satellites (Oceansat-2, Megha-Tropiques, Scatsat-1, SARAL, INSAT-3D, INSAT-3DR) with the exception of commercial high-resolution satellites data
What is Copernicus?
The multi-billion-euro Copernicus is Europe’s system for monitoring the earth using satellite data. It is coordinated and managed by the EC
- Copernicus is served by a set of dedicated satellites (the Sentinel families) and contributing missions (existing commercial and public satellites). The Sentinel satellites are specifically designed to meet the needs of the Copernicus services and their users. Since the launch of Sentinel-1A in 2014, the European Union set in motion a process to place a constellation of almost 20 more satellites in orbit before 2030
It has benefitted India in the past
The Copernicus emergency response mapping system was activated on at least two Indian occasions — during the 2014 floods in Andhra Pradesh in October 2014 and after the 2013 storm in Odisha.
