Copernicus Programme

Copernicus is the world's largest single earth observation programme and directed by the European Commission in partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA). It aims at achieving a global, continuous, autonomous, high quality, wide range Earth observation capacity. Providing accurate, timely and easily accessible information to, among other things, improve the management of the environment, understand and mitigate the effects of climate change, and ensure civil security. It follows and greatly expands on the work of the previous 2.3 billion euros European Envisat program which operated from 2002 to 2012.

Its cost during 1998 to 2020 are estimated at 6.7 billion euros with around €4.3bn spend in the period 2014 to 2020 and shared between the EU (66%) and ESA (33%) with benefits of the data to the EU economy estimated at roughly 30 billion euros through 2030. ESA as a main partner has performed much of the design and oversees and co-funds the development of Sentinel mission 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 with each sentinel mission consisting of at least 2 satellites and some like sentinel 1 consisting of 4 satellites. They will also provide the instruments for MTG and MetOp-SG weather satellites of EUMETSAT where ESA and EUMETSAT will also coordinate the delivery of data from upwards of 30 satellites that form the contributing satellite missions to Copernicus.

The objective is to use multi-source data to get timely and quality information, services and knowledge, and to provide autonomous and independent access to information in relation to the environment and security on a global level. In other words, it will pull together all the information obtained by the Copernicus environmental satellites, air and ground stations to provide a comprehensive picture of the "health" of Earth. The geo-spatial information services offered by Copernicus can be grouped into six main interacting themes: land, ocean, emergency response, atmosphere, security and climate change. The first three Copernicus services under the land, ocean and emergency response themes and two additional services addressing the atmosphere and security themes were unveiled at the Copernicus Forum held in Lille in September 2008.

Copernicus builds upon three components:

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