To fulfil these objectives and to promote applications of remotely sensed 
data the NRSC performs many collaborative projects with other users, 
Recent projects include hydrographic mapping, pollution monitoring, geolo- 
gical studies, volcanic monitoring, forestry inventory and land cover sur- 
veys. The Centre also operates a number of working groups, which have been 
set up to foster co-operation between the NRSC and its users. These cover 
coastal processes, land applications, geological studies, oceanography and 
marine applications, information handling techniques, hydrology and water 
resources management, microwave technology and education and training. 
At the Farnborough headquarters the NRSC provides a wide range of services 
and facilities for users. These include archive and browse facilities, 
interactive digital processing, film writing, digitising, digital mapping 
and an applications and interpretation consultancy. It also acts as the UK 
National Point of Contact with the European Space Agency's remote sensing 
organisation, Earthnet. 
The NRSC archives a large amount of satellite imagery, particularly LANDSAT 
and SPOT images, of mainly UK areas. Also held are microwave image data 
from SEASAT, acquired at the Oakhanger ground station in Southern England. 
The photographie laboratory operated by the Centre is able to provide a 
wide range of high quality products tailored to the requirements of indivi- 
dual customers. 
4 THE ERS DATA CENTRE 
To complement the large investment being made by the UK in the European 
Space Agency's ERS-1 spacecraft preparations are being made to establish a 
data centre to aid the exploitation of the data received. This centre will 
serve UK national goals and, on behalf of the European Space Agency, pro- 
vide a full archiving, processing and distribution facility for European 
users. It will be located at Farnborough. 
The ERS Data Centre is seen as a natural extension to the NRSC. Data will 
be received from the ground stations at West Freugh and Kiruna and products 
will be generated for onward distribution to users. These products will 
include Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery as well as wind, wave and 
sea-surface temperature measurements and certain of them will be available 
for delivery within 3 hours of data reception. 
The centre will archive low bit-rate and SAR data. Products generated off- 
line from this data will be to greater precision than those generated in 
near real-time. In support of this work the centre will play an active 
role in the acquisition and analysis of supporting data to enable the 
calibration and validation of products. This, together with the programme 
of algorithm development, will ensure that routines are kept up-to-date. 
The current status of the project is that a Phase B (design and cost) study 
is under-way, due for completion in October. Implementation of the centre 
will commence early in 1987, to be completed during 1989. 
5 ARCHIVING 
The existing archive of remotely sensed data at Farnborough is stored on 
CCTs. The tape library contains 21000 reels, holding in all approximately 
one terabyte of information. Perhaps 50% if this is 'original' data, 
including synthetic aperture radar high bit-rate data, LANDSAT imagery, 
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