The Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite, the first of two identical spacecraft, was successfully launched into Earth orbit on Saturday, 21 November 2020 to continue sea level observations for at least the next decade. You can read more about the launch and the mission here.

The data from this mission is coming into the Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC), the official NASA archive for the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich mission and physical oceanography data in general. For Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich in particular, the mission marks the first major NASA mission where publication of the data will be in an Amazon cloud environment. It is a major milestone in terms of making the data available for large scale science, especially in preparation for NASA’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission that will generate petabytes of data. SWOT data will also be distributed by PO.DAAC via AWS as well. Also, of significance is that 2020 marks the 40th anniversary of oceanography data services at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Once validation of the data products is complete, PO.DAAC will distribute Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich data to the general public and integrate data products into transformation, visualization, and analysis tools. More information regarding the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich mission and instrumentation is available from PO.DAAC’s Sentinel-6 Michael Frielich mission page, or Related Links below.

Data Release schedule:

• Public release of near real-time (NRT) and Short-time Critical (STC) products expected May 2021 
• Public release of Non-Time Critical (NTC)(Validated) expected September 2021