Sentinel-1

Mission Profile

Sentinel-1 is a pair of ESA Copernicus Programme synthetic aperture radar satellites, with Sentinel-1A launched on 3 April 2014 and Sentinel-1B in April 2016 aboard Soyuz-2 rockets, designed to provide systematic C-band SAR imagery of Europe, the Arctic, and global oceans regardless of weather conditions or daylight. Flying in the same orbital plane 180 degrees apart, the pair provides interferometric revisit times as short as 6 days over Europe, enabling monitoring of ground subsidence, glacier dynamics, earthquake deformation, ship traffic, oil spills, and flood mapping. Sentinel-1A lost power in August 2022 and was decommissioned, leaving Sentinel-1B as the single operational satellite until Sentinel-1C was launched in December 2024. The Sentinel-1 data is freely available to all users under the Copernicus open-access policy.