On Tuesday, Monica and I paid a visit to Eumetsat at their invitation. It was a good opportunity to exchange on latest activities, to understand the Eumetsat plans and position regarding Sentinel data and to brief them on and discuss our plans for the Marketplace Alliance.

We learned that Eumetsat now has committed observation missions right through to 2040. This includes Jason which is now a confirmed mission to which Eumetsat contributes. Companies may have access to Eumetsat products through Eumetcast.

Eumetsat is looking at the evolution of many of its operations and plans a series of pathfinder projects. These are not yet public and will be decided by their council next June. They will include looking at data access technology, cloud services and exploitation platforms for higher level information services.

Eumetsat was very interested to learn about the EARSC initiative to create a Marketplace and expressed strong interest as a potential data supplier. The technical solution is also of interest relating to the pathfinder studies to be confirmed in June. We agreed to exchange further over the coming months and EARSC looks to include Eumetsat views in our study on the Marketplace as part of the stakeholder analysis.

As we prepare to support companies to exploit the anticipated opening of Copernicus and Sentinel data and information, Eumetsat has an important role to play as operators of 3 of the Sentinel missions. We anticipate developing closer links and to see how the meteorological data can become part of the Marketplace which we plan to see developed.