The Sentinel fleet of satellites is designed to deliver land remote sensing data that are central to the European Commission’s Copernicus program. The Sentinel-2 mission is the result of close collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Commission, industry, service providers, and data users. The mission has been designed and built by a consortium of around 60 companies led by Airbus Defence and Space and supported by the CNES French space agency to optimize image quality and by the DLR German Aerospace Centre to improve data recovery using optical communications.
The Sentinel-2 mission consists of two satellites developed to support vegetation, land cover, and environmental monitoring. The Sentinel-2A satellite was launched by ESA on June 23, 2015, and operates in a sun-synchronous orbit with a 10-day repeat cycle. A second identical satellite (Sentinel-2B) was launched March 7, 2017.Together they cover all Earth’s land surfaces, large islands, and inland and coastal waters every five days.
The Sentinel-2MultiSpectral Instrument(MSI) acquires 13 spectral bands ranging from Visible and Near-Infrared (VNIR) to Shortwave Infrared (SWIR) wavelengths along a 290-km orbital swath.
The MSI sensor data are complementary to data acquired by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) (Comparison of Sentinel-2 and Landsat).
Spectral Bands and Resolution
The MSI measures reflected radiance through the atmosphere within 13 spectral bands. The spatial resolution is dependent on the particular spectral band:
- 4 bands at 10 meter: blue (490 nm), green (560 nm), red (665 nm), and near-infrared (842 nm).
- 6 bands at 20 meter: 4 narrow bands for vegetation characterization (705 nm, 740 nm, 783 nm, and 865 nm) and 2 larger SWIR bands (1,610 nm and 2,190 nm) for applications such as snow/ice/cloud detection or vegetation moisture stress assessment.
- 3 bands at 60 meter: mainly for cloud screening and atmospheric corrections (443 nm for aerosols, 945 nm for water vapor, and 1375 nm for cirrus detection).
SENTINEL-2 Radiometric and Spatial Resolutions
| Band Number | Central Wavelength (nm) | Bandwidth (nm) | Spatial Resolution (m) |
| 1 | 443 | 20 | 60 |
| 2 | 490 | 65 | 10 |
| 3 | 560 | 35 | 10 |
| 4 | 665 | 30 | 10 |
| 5 | 705 | 15 | 20 |
| 6 | 740 | 15 | 20 |
| 7 | 783 | 20 | 20 |
| 8 | 842 | 115 | 10 |
| 8a | 865 | 20 | 20 |
| 9 | 945 | 20 | 60 |
| 10 | 1375 | 30 | 60 |
| 11 | 1610 | 90 | 20 |
| 12 | 2190 | 180 | 20 |
| TCI* | RGB | Composite | 10 |
*Data acquired after December 5, 2016 include a full resolution True-Color Image as an RGB (red, green, blue) composite image created from bands 4, 3, 2.
TheUSGS Spectral Characteristics Viewerhelps users determine which spectral bands work best to identify their features of interest for image interpretation. This tool also facilitates the visualization of the Relative Spectral Response (RSR) of various satellite sensors.
