CNES projects library

January 25, 2017

Peps

In 2015, CNES launched a platform called PEPS that provides free access to data collected by the Sentinel satellites, in the hopes of encouraging French firms and research scientists to use it in their work.

With its unique fleet of six lines of Sentinel satellites, the European Union’s Copernicus environmental monitoring and security programme is set to generate a regular, massive flow of high-quality data. The Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 pairs of satellites will ultimately be sending back more than 10 terabytes of data every day, accumulating some 15 petabytes in all by 2020. And for 2018, the European platform will bring all this data, as well as its data processing capabilities, to citizens, scientists and commercial firms around the world.

Until then, to fulfil national demand, CNES has opened its PEPS (Sentinel Product Exploitation Platform), which lets users quickly search, select and download SAR radar data from Sentinel-1A. High resolution data from Sentinel-2A’s optical imaging instrument and medium resolution data from the wide-field imaging instrument and altimeter on Sentinel-3A are also be available. PEPS also gives users the ability to process data on-line—atmospheric corrections, monthly synoptic reports, etc.—so that they don’t have to store large volumes of data on their computers.

Developed at CNES’s Toulouse Space Centre (CST), the PEPS platform will evolve in 2020 into an integrated Europe-wide system involving key industry players in big data and cloud computing, to meet a challenge that goes beyond the space sector and to lay the foundations of a new geo-located data digital ecosystem.

See also

PEPS website