Sentinel-2

Sentinel-2 is an Earth observation mission from the Copernicus Programme that acquires optical imagery at high spatial resolution (10 m to 60 m) over land and coastal waters. The mission's Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-2B satellites were joined in orbit in 2024 by a third, Sentinel-2C, and in the future by Sentinel-2D, eventually replacing the A and B satellites, respectively.

The mission supports services and applications such as agricultural monitoring, emergencies management, land cover classification, and water quality.

Sentinel-2 has been developed and is being operated by the European Space Agency. The satellites were manufactured by a consortium led by Airbus Defence and Space in Friedrichshafen, Germany.

The Sentinel-2 mission includes:

To achieve frequent revisits and high mission availability, two identical Sentinel-2 satellites (Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-2B) operate together. The satellites are phased 180 degrees from each other on the same orbit. This allows for what would be a 10-day revisit cycle to be completed in 5 days. The 290 km swath is created by the VNIR and SWIR, which are each made of 12 detectors that are lined in two offset rows.

The orbits are Sun-synchronous at 786 km (488 mi) altitude, 14.3 revolutions per day, with a 10:30 a.m. descending node. This local time was selected as a compromise between minimizing cloud cover and ensuring suitable Sun illumination. It is close to the Landsat local time and matches SPOT's, allowing the combination of Sentinel-2 data with historical images to build long-term time series.

The launch of the first satellite, Sentinel-2A, occurred 23 June 2015 at 01:52 UTC on a Vega launch vehicle.

Sentinel-2B was launched on 7 March 2017 at 01:49 UTC, also aboard a Vega rocket.