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make the necessary investment to develop this new techniques when 
they are assured of long term coverage. 
Seasat-B, C and the microwave experiment are all applications of 
the active sensor technique which is especially important to 
Europe because of their all-weather characteristics. 
Handling of the future European remote sensing satellites has 
been one of the prime aims setting up the Earthnet programme. 
2. Higher standards 
At present Earthnet aims at distributing a limited set of standard- 
ised products which are well suited to the development of remote 
sensing applications in general. Future operational needs, however, 
will require the possibility to compare, with high accuracy, data 
from different acquisition dates and different satellites. Setting 
up a precision preprocessing facility will then become of prime 
importance. In view of the high investment necessary to implement 
this step, a centralised facility may prove the most cost effective 
solution. This would obviously have to go together with the setting 
up of a central archiving facility. In such a scheme the role of 
the acquisition stations would be centred on acquisition of the data, 
generation of Q/L products: (bulk processed) and generation of 
archival tapes, whilst the archiving and preprocessing would be 
executed by the central facility, to be set up at Frascati. 
Arrangements have been made with national points of contact, for the diffu- 
sion of Landsat data to the user community. The names of these bodies with 
whom contracts have been completed are shown in Attachment 3. They cover 
essentially rules for the distribution of these data, organisation of training 
activities and harmonization of relationships between the users. All data 
acquired by Earthnet are made accessible to national users on an open and 
non-discriminatory basis.