First Images from Sentinel-1 Are Arriving

With the launch of the first Sentinel satellite on April 3, 2014, Europe is back on Earth observation. This is great news for everyone—especially since new open data policies are applicable in Europe. Small businesses can access, without charge, the imagery produced by the satellites thanks to the EC's Open Data policy, and use them to develop new products and services for profit. This means that we will have access to the data to create products based on Sentinel-1 and CartoDB. Parts of CartoDB were developed with support from the Seventh Framework Programme, so this is a great match.

Sentinel-1 has many different case uses, but some of the applications we can already envision are:

We could not be more excited at CartoDB, and would like to show an early a map of one of the first datasets made available by Sentinel-1. This is a radar acquisition from April 22, 2014 showing Greece’s Attica region; Athens is in the center of the image. The water shows the differences made by waves and currents.

CartoDB is a wonderful tool to harness images made by satellites, and with the European Earth Observation Programme Copernicus and its Sentinel missions, we are really looking forward to partnering with scientists and users in general to extract all the value we can from these satellites.

Long live Sentinel-1!