RADARSAT-1 was Canada’s first earth observation satellite. It launched in November of 1995 and was active for 17 years until 2013. According to the Canadian Space Agency, RADARSAT-1 orbited Earth 90,828 times, traveled over two billion kilometers, and provided data for 244 disaster events. In 2007, the Canadian government launched RADARSAT-2. The RADARSAT Constellation Mission, a three-spacecraft fleet of earth observation satellites, will launch in May of 2019.
The Canadian Space Agency and the Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation have released RADARSAT-1’s archive of 36,500 satellite images to the public. Available via the Government of Canada’s Earth Observation Data Management System, the release is part of the Canadian government’s effort to make its data available to “encourage novel Big Data Analytic and Data Mining activities by users.” For more open data from Canada’s government, users can also browse the list of Canadian Space Agency’s Open Data.
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- Open data: over 36,000 historical RADARSAT-1 satellite images of the Earth now available to the public
- Earth Observation Data Management System
