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.