TERRASCOPE has been recognised as the Belgian contribution to the Sentinel Collaborative Ground Segment (CollGS).
It provides users with free and open data from the Sentinel missions, whether they’re interested in global vegetation monitoring, land change detection, drought monitoring, sea and ocean monitoring or atmosphere study with help of optical or radar data.
Sentinel-derived data products such as LAI and fAPAR are also available, as well as showcases and web services to access, discover and view Sentinel data. Third parties can even make use of computing power to generate their own information products.
Terrascope provides a user-friendly platform to access satellite data and derived information to the Belgian users
The Sentinels are a fleet of European satellites designed and developed by ESA to deliver the data and imagery that are central to Europe's Copernicus environmental programme.
The Sentinel Open Access Hub provides complete, free and open access to Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 user products. However, only lower level products are provided over a limited time frame and the data are not always easily available to all.
To remediate this issue, ESA and its Member States therefore created the Sentinel Collaborative Ground Segment (CollGS) to facilitate the access to the Sentinel data and the data exploitation.
A CollGS allows an easier, complementary access to Sentinel data and/or to specific data products or distribution channels and is funded by national third parties (i.e. from outside the ESA/EU Copernicus programme). A CollGS can:
- Build up its own mirror data archive and base operational services on Sentinel data and redistribute the data and value added products from the "mirror sites", to institutional, commercial and science users;
- Acquire data in near real time;
- Process complementary product, define complementary algorithms or provide hosted processing;
- Develop innovative tools and applications;
- Support calibration and validation activities.