Impact of the Sentinel-1B failure on our products and services
The Copernicus Sentinel-1B satellite is unavailable since the 23rd December 2021 (06:53 UTC). By the end of February, after 2 months of thorough investigation, ESA announced that the anomaly is due to reactivation of both the main and redundant power regulators that supply power to the SAR electronics subsystem. Although the satellite is under control in the orbit, no new acquisitions are expected for at least a few months. Here is a summary of the impact on the Sentinel-1 related services we provide:
- GRD products: no change, and sigma0 values will be calculated routinely just for Sentinel-1A images.
- Coherence products: The unique 6 days coherence product available in the Terrascope viewer can only be provided by using both Sentinel-1A and Sentnel-1B. Therefore, we switched to a 12 days coherence product available as of December 23, 2021.
- CropSAR service: The CropSAR service combines both Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data allowing us to look through the clouds, use more observations and therefore upscale agricultural monitoring efforts. Detailed analysis has been done considering different scenarios between availability of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2. It was concluded that the CropSAR service can stay fully operational with about one Sentinel-1 observation per month as long as Sentinel-2 data is available.
Although a restart of Sentinel-1 is not yet excluded, Sentinel-1B users should keep into account a long-term unavailability of data provision (several months). In the meantime ESA will continue very detailed investigations related to the satellite power system’s with the objective to get the satellite operational again.
