More than 40 Earth Observation missions team up to provide data to the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security programme (Forwarded)

ESA News
http://www.esa.int

5 September 2008

More than 40 Earth Observation missions team up to provide data to the
Global Monitoring for Environment and Security programme

ESA, as coordinator of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security
(GMES) Space Component and related data access, received in response to a
call 12 proposals offering to provide data from more than 40 European and
non-European Earth Observation satellites to GMES Services over the next
years.

Among the satellites are ESA Member States' missions, such as France's Spot
and Pleiades satellites, Germany's TerraSAR-X, Italy's CosmoSkyMed, the
UK-led DMC constellation (including the soon-to-be launched DMC-UK2 and
Spain's Deimos-1), as well as Canada's Radarsat, Israel's EROS and other
non-European missions distributed through European companies. In addition,
ESA will act as data provider for its own Earth Observation (EO) missions,
such as Envisat and ERS-2, as well as its Third Party Missions.

Some agencies, such as ESA and the European Organisation for the
Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), are offering their
data free of charge, while others are offering favourable conditions to the
GMES Services.

The GMES programme is a European Union-led initiative in partnership with
ESA to combine ground- and space-based observations to develop an integrated
environmental monitoring capability.

ESA coordinates the flow of EO data into GMES Services and the access to
these data.

As primary recipients of these data, the European Commission has identified
five initial GMES Core Services projects, including three fast-track
services focusing on land, marine and emergency services and two pilot
service projects focusing on security and atmospheric composition. These
GMES Services will start their preoperational phase in the coming months.

The fleet of GMES contributing missions is constantly increasing, with the
latest launch of the German 5-satellite RapidEye constellation on 29 August
2008.

"With the successful launch of the entire RapidEye satellite constellation,
RapidEye is excited to be able to immediately participate and contribute in
such an important ESA-led cooperation as the GMES Space component and the
Data Access project," RapidEye CEO Wolfgang Biedermann said.

As coordinator, ESA will harmonise the data flow and data access based on
harmonised protocols and standards developed by European Space Agencies
through the Heterogeneous Mission Accessibility (HMA) Project.

To ensure GMES Services have quick, easy and coherent access to the data
from all of these missions, ESA will provide a dedicated Data Access Portal
where GMES Services can obtain relevant information and access the data
products. Many of data sets will be distributed relying on the operators of
contributing satellite missions.

Preoperational data provision to the five Core Services projects is planned
to begin before the end of 2008.

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