

We live in a time when a satellite image can be obtained in one click. Optical, infrared and radio. And also the history of changes in a certain coordinate for several years.
The Green Cat found the crashed Soviet research station Mars-3 using satellite images, thousands of environmentalists are monitoring the Amazon forests and the state of the coastline, schoolchildren are doing educational projects to monitor the walrus population, reporters are investigating, freeing slaves , monitoring refugee camps .
I offer you a selection of free resources and projects with satellite data, programs for processing this data and useful articles.

User-friendly database of images from Sentinel 2/Landsat. The database is updated every 5-10 days with new images. Here you can track various GIS variables, such as NDVI or NDWO. EO Browser simplifies time-lapse browsing. Resolution - 10 m / pix.

ESA website with a database of images from 6 Copernicus Sentinel satellites. Here you can find open and free access data from Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3 and Sentinel-5P. There is an API and you can create your own search scripts. There is a possibility of synchronous access to the most recent snapshots and asynchronous access to historical information.

An interactive service from NASA with a user-friendly interface. Allows anyone to monitor the situation on the planet right in the browser: follow fires, dust storms, hurricanes, tropical cyclones, melting ice, volcanic eruptions, or just admire the night lights.

Combines European Space Agency Earth observation data on topics such as temperature, agriculture and ice sheets.


A remote sensing program created by the European Space Agency that allows various enhancements and manipulations of remote sensing data. Allows you to view gigapixel images, work with layers, visualize statistics and build graphs.

Satellite images and analytical base in the public domain. Virtually any satellite imagery collected by NASA, NOAA, USGS, etc. is available. Medium to coarse resolution images compared to high resolution commercial images. There is a learning curve with Javascript.


A search engine that allows users to visually query images for similar geographic features. The Descartes Labs platform is based on satellite imagery from Landsat, the National Agricultural Imaging Program (NAIP) and PlanetScope.
More recent than Google’s satellite imagery from places like Afghanistan and Iran.

A non-profit group that helps the global developer community discover, research, and analyze archives of satellites, drones, and aerial imagery. Radiant Earth works with Code of Africa in particular.
They publish a lot of useful materials , make training courses , hold competitions for data analysts .

Soar.Earth was created because the world needs a scalable, collaborative and accountable knowledge base of all its maps and images. Our mission is to create the world’s largest digital atlas based on maps and images from individuals, organizations and communities.
Useful articles