For five years EOC has been processing the raw data from the four Sentinel satellites (Sentinel-1A and -1B as well as Sentinel-3A and -3B) on behalf of ESA. This contract has now been renewed for another year.
Five years ago, DLR's Earth Observation Center took over responsibility on behalf of ESA for the Sentinel-1 Processing and Archiving Center (PAC). One-and-a-half years later processing of data from the Ocean and Land Colour Instrument (OLCI) on Sentinel-3 was added. Since that time image data has been generated from the raw data arriving from the four Sentinel satellites (-1A, -1B, -3A, -3B), stored at the German Satellite Data Archive (D-SDA) at EOC, and made available to users worldwide.
The duration of ESA's Sentinel PAC contract at EOC has now been extended to the end of 2020. Starting in February, the PAC at EOC will additionally take over the responsibilities of a partner facility in Great Britain (UK-PAC), since ESA is not continuing its operation. At that point the PAC at DLR will shoulder the entire load of Sentinel-1 data processing.
Satellite data with a total volume of 13.2 petabytes (almost 14 million gigabytes) have been archived so far at EOC and 9.5 million Sentinel data sets were processed and archived. By the end of the year the amount of data is expected to grow by 3.5 petabytes and 2.7 million data sets.
Forest fires in southeast Australia, 13 Jan. 2020, Sentinel-3A-OLCI, data processing at DLR-PAC; © Copernicus Sentinel Data (2020)
Since ESA no longer provides older Sentinel images online via its data portal, the Copernicus Open Access Hub (see link), requests for data from the Long-term Data Archive (LTA) increased considerably in 2019.
Over half a million data sets with a volume of 170 TB have been so far provided from the LTA.