Earth Observation Data Platform

Earth observation
data in one place.

Explore, download, visualize, and process Earth data on the atmosphere, climate, land, and ocean.

  1. 01 Atmosphere Cloud, aerosol, trace gas and radiation through the column.
  2. 02 Climate The long records that turn observations into trends.
  3. 03 Land Surface, vegetation, soil and the built environment.
  4. 04 Ocean & Marine Sea surface, colour, ice and the coastal margin.
Why we built it

Observations,
turned into knowledge.

Our Vision

To make Earth-observation data more accessible and understandable, transforming observations into knowledge for a better-informed and more sustainable future.

Our Mission

Developing accessible interfaces and data-analysis tools that empower researchers, stakeholders, and the public to discover, explore, visualize, and analyze Earth-observation data.

Our Approach

We will tap into the Earth science community's end-to-end capability as an open enterprise to incorporate innovation, scientific discovery, and emerging user needs to accelerate the use of Earth science and inform the next iteration of programs, missions, and initiatives.

A four-tier pyramid showing how observations become knowledge, with a cycle arrow returning from the top back to the base.
Public understanding & exchange

What comes back out — and the needs that set the next iteration.

Solutions & societal value

Findings and tools shaped for the people who act on them.

Earth system science & applied research

Retrievals, comparisons and statistics that turn a granule into a measurement.

Foundational knowledge, technology, missions & data

The archives themselves: what the instruments recorded, from space, air and ground.

User needs inform the next iteration of programs and missions.

Missions

Two agencies,
one working environment.

RASAD is built to carry Earth-observation missions from more than one programme — the same search, the same figures, whichever agency flew the instrument.

The ESA Earth Explorer family drawn as spacecraft in an arc around a globe made of photographic tiles of ice, forest, cloud and ocean.

Earth Explorer & Copernicus missions

The European Space Agency flies Earth Explorers to answer one scientific question each, and the Copernicus Sentinels to keep an operational watch on the planet. Between them they cover cloud and aerosol, wind, gravity, soil moisture, ice thickness, forest carbon and atmospheric composition.

Earth Explorers
9 flown
Sentinels
6 families
On this platform
EarthCARE
ESA Earth observation
A wide formation of NASA Earth-observing satellites in low orbit above the blue limb of the Earth.

Earth Science missions

NASA's Earth science fleet has been recording the planet continuously since the 1990s, from Terra and Aqua through GPM, OCO, ICESat-2 and PACE. Its long, calibrated records are what make a single overpass legible as part of a trend.

Active missions
20+
Record begins
1997
On this platform
Planned
NASA Earth observation
On the platform today

EarthCARE is live. The rest are on the way.

What each spacecraft measures, the orbit it flies, and where it stands on the platform. The missions still ahead are listed in the order they are being brought on.

The EarthCARE spacecraft: a white bus carrying the cloud radar's dish antenna, with a five-panel solar wing trailing behind it.
ESA · JAXA

EarthCARE

Cloud, aerosol and radiation, profiled in one column of air.

Instruments
Radar · Lidar · Radiometer
Orbit
Sun-synchronous
Altitude
393 km
The Sentinel-5P spacecraft: a copper-wrapped bus between two dark solar wings, with the TROPOMI radiator panel angled off its lower flank.
ESA · Copernicus

Sentinel-5P

TROPOMI — trace gases over the whole globe, every day.

Instruments
Atmospheric composition
Orbit
Sun-synchronous
Altitude
824 km
Coming soon
The Sentinel-4 sounder spacecraft: a gold and silver bus between two wide solar wings on booms.
ESA · Copernicus

Sentinel-4

Air quality over Europe, hour by hour, from geostationary orbit.

Instruments
UVN spectrometer
Orbit
Geostationary
Altitude
Slot 0°
Coming soon
The Sentinel-3 spacecraft: a white and black bus with its instruments facing down and one long three-panel solar wing.
ESA · Copernicus

Sentinel-3

Aerosol, surface temperature and colour along a wide swath.

Instruments
Ocean and land colour
Orbit
Sun-synchronous
Altitude
814 km
Coming soon
The Aeolus-2 spacecraft: a gold-wrapped bus with a large circular telescope aperture and one raised solar wing.
ESA · EUMETSAT

Aeolus-2

Wind profiles from a Doppler lidar, pole to pole.

Instruments
Wind lidar
Orbit
Sun-synchronous
Altitude
≈320 km
Planned
Right now

The fleet, live

NASA's Eyes on the Earth, running inside this page — every Earth-observing spacecraft where it is at this moment.

Connecting to NASA Eyes on the Earth

NASA's viewer is not answering. Open it in a new tab below.

© NASA/JPL-Caltech Open in a new tab
Latest from the agencies

What the Earth
has been doing.

Straight from NASA's Earth Observatory and ESA's Observing the Earth newsroom.

What Lake Bonneville Left Behind

The drying of the massive lake exposed playas that became the setting for feats of engineering and technological ingenuity, as well as epic tales of exploration and desperation.

Sentinel-1 captures major ice loss from Greenland glacier

Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission has captured a dramatic change at Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland, where a 76 sq km section of the glacier’s floating ice tongue broke away…

ESA’s photosynthesis satellite fuelled

Europe’s newest eye on the health of Earth’s vegetation has taken another crucial step towards orbit – the European Space Agency’s FLEX satellite has been fuelled at Europe’s Spaceport in…

An Uncommon Drifter in the Denmark Strait

A large iceberg, observed in summer 2026, had drifted more than 1,000 kilometers south from the northeastern Greenland bay where it likely originated.

Replay: MTG-I2 pre-launch media briefing

Video: 00:51:38 On Wednesday 19 August, media representatives were invited to a media briefing ahead of the launch of the next Meteosat Third Generation Imager satellite (MTG-I2). The…

Elephant Butte Reservoir Runs Low

Drought in the Rio Grande basin contributed to New Mexico’s largest reservoir dwindling to its lowest level in decades.

Wildfires, drought and extreme heat, 2026

Earth observation satellites help us monitor phenomena such as wildfires, drought and heatwaves from space. This page is updated on a regular basis with a selection of ESA’s most recent…

Capabilities

From archive
to figure.

Everything between the search and the paper happens here — no reader to write, no colour scale to look up, nothing to install.

ECA_EXBC_ATL_FM__2A_20260721T111014Z_20260721T141622Z_12191E frame 12191E · 21 Jul 2026
A lidar feature mask plotted as height against time, with latitude and longitude along the top, a black surface line and brown ground fill.

Rendered by the platform — geolocation, local solar time and the ground already in place, at the colour convention the product expects.

A ground lidar firing a green beam into the night sky above a lit city.
Search by place and time

Point, radius and window — orbit, frame and baseline resolve themselves.

An aerosol backscatter plume plotted from the surface to sixteen kilometres over a dawn horizon.
Quicklooks for every product

Each granule drawn to its own convention, one click after landing.

A radar tower under its dome, with a colour-coded sweep out to 150 kilometres laid over it.
Curtains at every resolution

Low, medium and native grids, switched without re-downloading.

A backscatter curtain beside a single extinction profile, at 355, 532 and 1064 nanometres.
A profile at any point

One click on the track, with the spread of its neighbours behind it.

A satellite view of the eastern Mediterranean with a boxed region drawn across it.
Statistics over a region

Between any two points of the pass, mapped and tabulated.

A ground station on a mountain ridge, the overpass track marked vertically above it.
Ground Cal/Val

A station file and the overpass on one figure, matched in space and time.

A satellite in orbit with its measurement swath drawn unbroken across the Earth below.
Frames merged seamlessly

A scene that falls on a boundary is still one continuous curtain.

A time series, a global map and an aerosol-type ring chart, laid out as exported figures.
Figures and numbers out

PNG for the paper, Excel for everything after it.

Workflow

A run is
three steps.

  1. 01 Put the point on the globe

    Pick the place and the window that matter to you.

  2. 02 Tick the products

    Collection, baseline and frame resolve themselves.

  3. 03 Read the figure

    Geolocated, ground-referenced, ready for the paper.

Granules land once and are shared between accounts — your quota counts only what is actually yours.

The constellation is already overhead.

Every pass recorded over your region is one search away.

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