Sentinel-1 mission status

Sentinel-1A has been launched from Kourou on a Soyuz rocket on 3rd April 2014. The second satellite Sentinel-1B is planned to be launched first half of 2016. The In-Orbit Commissioning phase was completed on 23 September 2014, followed by the so-called operational qualification phase (ramp-up). This ramp-up operations phase is a phase during which the capacity of the overall system, including the ground segment operations, is progressively increased, together with the gradual release of the operationally qualified products. The ramp-up phase is being completed at the time of writing this paper (end May 2015); at this stage the routine operations are starting. The Full Operation Capacity (FOC) of the mission will be reached once the In-Orbit Commissioning phase of Sentinel-1B and the subsequent constellation operational qualification phase will have been completed, indicatively by end 2016. The paper provides high-level information on the ongoing mission operations, at the time of the ramp-up phase completion. It described at high level the system operations, incl. ground segment operational activities, as well as some user data access statistics. It presents few examples of mission results achieved during the first year of Sentinel-1A in orbit, in some key application domains.