London appears as a cluster of bright radar reflections along the River Thames in this radar image from Sentinel-1A.
The satellite captured this image on March 4, 2015, in its Interferometric Wide Swath mode and dual polarization, from which the artificial color composite was generated.
The Sentinel family of satellites is being developed to meet the operational needs of Europe’s environment monitoring program, Copernicus. The first in the fleet, Sentinel-1A, has been in orbit for just under a year while the next, Sentinel-2A, is scheduled for launch in June 2015.
The SENTINEL-1 mission comprises a constellation of two polar-orbiting satellites, operating day and night performing C-band synthetic aperture radar imaging, enabling them to acquire imagery regardless of the weather. SENTINEL-1 will work in a pre-programmed operation mode to avoid conflicts and to produce a consistent long-term data archive built for applications based on long time series. SENTINEL-1 is the first of the five missions that ESA is developing for the Copernicus initiative