In only 14 months, one million gigabytes or one petabyte of data from the European radar satellite Sentinel-1 were acquired, processed and archived at DLR’s Earth Observation Center. Sentinel-1 is the first of a whole fleet of European earth observation satellites with various sensors and specializations. On behalf of ESA, EOC manages the Sentinel-1 / Sentinel-3 OLCI Processing and Archiving Centre. The Sentinels represent a milestone in the European earth observation programme, also with respect to the availability of earth observation data in Europe. The Sentinels cause a dramatic increase in the amount of data to be processed and archived.
Accordingly, more than 750,000 Sentinel-1 data sets, from raw data sets to Level-0 products to value-added Level-2 products, have already been safeguarded in the EOC long-term data archive. The amount of data stored since December 2014 for this one mission alone is equivalent to all the radar data from the Envisat satellite that were generated and processed during its mission lifetime of over ten years.