Samples of data products from a range of Third Party Missions are now available to download, offering a preview of what these missions provide.

ESA’s Third Party Missions programme consists of over 50 satellite missions from commercial and public organisations worldwide. ESA promotes the free availability of these datasets through agreements with the data providers, for the purposes of research and application development.

With such a wide, and growing, range of datasets, it may be difficult to identify which mission or data collection best supports your needs. To help preview and compare the data collections, samples from 13 Third Party Missions have been released.

Download the sample data from the following pages:

• COSMO-SkyMed First Generation
• COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation
• GEOSAT-1
• GEOSAT-2
• IRS-P5 (CartoSat-1)
• IRS-P6 (ResourceSat-1)
• IRS-R2 (ResourceSat-2)
• PAZ
• PlanetScope
• RapidEye
• SkySat
• Vision-1
• WorldView-3

The samples are freely available, and contain selected examples from the mission datasets. The samples are available for optical and radar missions, and organised according to the product structure used by the data providers, closely simulating what to expect from the full collection.

Products distributed via ESA dissemination services – nominally those available in the ESA archive collections – are published in EO-SIP format, which is a package that contains the metadata file, browse images, and original data in their native format.

All of the sample images from optical satellites were acquired over ESA’s test site at La Crau, in France, while all radar data were acquired over a test site at Neustrelitz, in Germany.

Acquiring imagery over the same sites allows for a comparison of how different satellites view the same area, helping you to decide what missions and their resolution, product type, visual bands, acquisition and polarisation modes may suit your requirements.

The sample datasets are available to download via dedicated pages of the relevant missions, which contain the list of files to download. When you find a mission that meets your requirements, follow the references to the full data collections to learn more about their attributes - including temporal and spatial coverage - and how to access the products.

Data samples from other Third Party Missions will be offered in the future as they become available, helping you to select the products you need.