Land Applications
® Agriculture/Forestry
e Water resources
e Development Aid
Global Ocean Monitoring
COMMON e Air-sea interaction
EUROPEAN e Circulation
PLATFORM e Polar ice surveys
Coastal Ocean Monitoring
e Fisheries
e Environmental monitoring
e Surveillance (economic zone)
e Continental shelf operations
Fig. 1 Payloads for Buropean Remote Sensing
Satellite Programme
In order to minimise the overall costs of such a
development activity, a common satellite platform needs to
be produced that is capable of embarking different sensor
payloads for the different missions. These aspects are
covered in greater detail in section 5.
3. EARTHNET
Earthnet (2) comprises a number of data reception and
preprocessing facilities located in Europe that acquire, pre-
process, distribute and archive satellite remote sensing data.
The network operates at present with data from NASA satellites
(Landsat, Seasat, HCMM and Nimbus-G) but is expected in the
future to form the basic elements for the acquisition of data
from the European remote sensing satellites once these are
developed.
A key objective of Earthnet is to provide European
investigators with an early access to remote sensing satellite
data in order that promising applications may be identified
and valuable experience gained on the use of these new tech-
niques to European problems and situations.
The different elements of the network are shown in Fig.2,
and the coverage zones for the different reception stations
are indicated in Fig. 3.