Welcome to the European Space Agency Earth Observation from Space– the Optical View Massive Open Online Course. ESA is developing a fleet of satellite to observe and monitor the Earth. So data processed and distributed from those satellites are freely available for science use, services, also for decision-makers. We are in the midst of a sensing revolution. We never had so much data. It tells us a lot of things about the Earth that we didn’t know. It provides new insight, not only for science but also for applications, serving our society, understanding how the Earth operate as a system, and also delivering the new generation of information services.

This course is about optical remote sensing. That means looking at satellite data between the visible and the short-wave infrared. It’s this part of the spectrum that encompasses the living bit of the Earth’s surface, the bits that are growing– the plants, the phytoplankton, the agriculture, and the forest. Technology for acquiring image data at higher and higher spatial and temporal resolution, finer and finer detail, has dramatically improved over the past decades. And that’s enabled remote sensing to explore and understand parts of the Earth’s system to measure change land use, agricultural applications, forest applications, ocean applications. The optical domain is very natural. People can understand it’s going from the fishery management to food security, energy management.

This is really where the light is meeting the light. So we will have incredible insight from space into how our planet is a living organism, about the carbon cycle, about phytoplankton in the ocean and vegetation on the land, and how these two interact as a couple Earth system.

Now you’ve got the capability to collect data, digitally and almost instantaneously transmit it to the Earth. Optical Earth observation technology has enabled new applications like urban planning, monitoring of vehicles, mapping of building heights in urban environments like this, monitoring humanitarian movements, or looking at detailed changes in the environment that might affect the wildlife.

What is really unique about Earth’s observation is that it touches many disciplines. And it’s a kind of integrator around one common objective, which is understanding our planet. You get a global picture but also the level of details but also to use this information to support decision-making. The simple objective of this course is to de-mystify the use of Earth observation data. We will guide you along this five weeks of this course, through the generation of the imagery, we will explain to you the data distributed, how they can be accessed, and how they can be handled. You can learn at your own pace.

And also, you will have the opportunities to enhance in the data, how to practically work with the data, and derive relevant information from 40 years of imaging the Earth. We look forward to you joining this course. And we sincerely hope that you will understand how we can derive really useful information from satellite data.