Building the Sentinel-1A observation Scenario
Schmuck, Siegfried1; Potin, Pierre2
1Rhea, ITALY; 2ESA, ITALY

As part of the European Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) program, the Sentinel-1 mission, based on a constellation of two satellites, will ensure continuity of C-band SAR observations for a large number of applications, building on ESA’s and Canada's heritage on satellite SAR systems (ERS, ENVISAT and RADARSAT).

The first satellite is planned for launch end 2013, the second within the following two years. After the initial 3-month commissioning phase, the amount of SAR acquisitions will gradually increase over time during the so-called ramp-up operations phase. Differently from the Envisat mission, the Sentinel missions will acquire the data based on a predefined planning, fulfilling to the best feasible extent the observation requirements from the various users. This planning needs to be conflict-free and must take into account the changing system technical constraints throughout the ramp-up phase and later the full operations phase.

The presentation will cover the initial 6 months of the Sentinel-1A observation scenario. It will present details of the actual planning process, the conflict resolution and some of the trade-offs to accommodate the different user requirements, and will also outline the further evolution of the observation scenario during the following months of the ramp-up phases.