ESA’s latest Third Party Missions Data Access Guide has been published, providing technical details and information on available data collections for all current or past Third Party Missions.

The December 2023 version of ESA’s Third Party Missions (TPM) Data Access Guide is now available for download. This is your go-to guide to the offering of TPM data (from current or Heritage missions), including the collection descriptions and how to access them.

The 2023 version of this guide has been revised with respect to the 2022 version, to include recently available data collections provided by new missions in the TPM portfolio – FSSCat, KOMPSAT-1, Landsat RBV, NovaSAR-1 and TanSat.

Featured Datasets - specific subsets of data collections that are freely available online via Immediate Access or Fast Approval - are the topic of one section in the guide. These open datasets provide data over a restricted area and/or with a limited time period and can be obtained following submission of a simple form.

The new featured collections are ALOS PRISM Level-1c European coverage cloud free, GEOSAT-2 Portugal coverage, GEOSAT-2 Spain coverage 2021 consisting of 1 m PAN and 4 m multispectral imagery, Landsat 5 TM European and Mediterranean countries cloud free collection, Landsat 7 ETM+ European and Mediterranean countries cloud free collection and finally, KOMPSAT-1 coverage of 50 European cities.

Other notable new collections, that are not included in the featured section, include Cartosat-1 Euro-Maps 3D, and ESA archives for ICEYE, PAZ, PlanetScope and SkySat.
 

ESA’s Third Party mission programme is an important pillar in the agency’s Earth Observation (EO) offering. For over 45 years ESA’s Earthnet programme has provided a framework to access EO data from non-ESA missions and in the past 15 years alone, more than 14,300 research projects used TPM data.

By combining TPM data with those from ESA missions, data users can exploit the synergy between all sources of data to foster cutting edge research.

ESA’s TPM Data Access Guide is instrumental in facilitating access to the data. The purpose of the guide is to provide an accurate summary of all data available from TPM missions and point out what applications the data could be used for. Practical procedures required for accessing the data are explained, including registration, search, selection and retrieval of the data of interest.

The guide is structured in multiple sections, starting with an in-depth explanation of ESA’s overall data policy and the process to order and download TPM data. Users are supported in understanding and selecting data from the various types available, with data presented according to various categories, such as spatial and temporal coverage.

There are various ways to access the data, and these are summarised in a designated section, with information about how to get assistance with data access and TPM products.

There is a step-by-step guide to submitting a project proposal, and how-to-guides informing about ESA’s EO Catalogue (EO-CAT) and download tool and the EO Analysis tool.

There is also one full section with in-depth explanations of the data product characteristics for each TPM mission and instruments and another on featured datasets.

Finally, the guide highlights some future potential additions to the TPM portfolio, so that data users can see what’s next on the horizon for the ever expanding TPM programme.

A new version of the TPM Data Access Guide is expected in Q3 2024. Download the guide and start your journey with TPM data today.