What is Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS)? What is EU’s Copernicus programme

Why in News ? On the request of Iran, the European Union (EU) has  activated its rapid satellite mapping service to help search efforts in finding the crashed chpper of Iranian president.

The rapid mapping service is one of the crucial components of the Emergency Management Service (EMS), which comes under the EU’s Copernicus programme.

How does the rapid mapping work?

• To provide maps quickly, the service acquires, processes, and analyses satellite imagery, geospatial data, and social media when required. According to the Copernicus website, the RM service can supply four different “products” — each one of them provides maps and brief analysis — which the user can choose while requesting the service.

What is the Europe Union’s Copernicus programme?

• It was launched in 1998, the Copernicus programme was earlier called Global Monitoring for Environmental Security (GMES).
• Currently, it is implemented by the European Commission (EC) with support from the ESA and the European Environment Agency (EEA).
• The Copernicus programme is part of the EU’s space programme and aims to monitor the Earth and its environment by collecting data from a set of satellites known as the Sentinels.
• It also gets data from contributing missions (existing commercial and public satellites) and in situ or non-space sources such as ground stations.
• The data are processed and analysed to generate value-added information, which can be used for a wide range of applications in many areas.
• These include land management, the marine environment, the atmosphere, emergency response, security, and climate change, according to the website of the European Space Agency (ESA). Users get the information on a “full, open, and free-of-charge” basis.