SARscape orbit files download issue: Sentinel Download Auxiliary files

In March 2021, SARscape’s automatic orbit file retrieval for Sentinel-1 data stopped working. The issue was due to several major changes operated by ESA on the availability and quality of orbit files, ranging from the reprocessing of the whole archive to its migration to a new portal, accessible via a new API. This process incurred some technical problems and took longer than originally planned. During the migration, the whole orbit file archive was removed from the original source and made temporarily available through manual download from static web pages. ESA restored the full functionality on April 13, 2021 (https://scihub.copernicus.eu/news/News00858).

SARscape addressed this issue in patch 5.6.0 20210331, which is now available for download via the usual channels. Among other improvements, this patch fixes the automatic orbit download issue by using both the new API for acquiring orbit files and the previous system for AUX_INS and AUX_CAL data (which was not involved in the migration).

As the freshly reprocessed orbit files are published under a different file name, this update will not remove any orbit file from a previously populated local SARscape repository. It might be worth to first delete the local AUX_POEORB and AUX_RESORB directories where SARscape downloads such data and start a full download with the new Sentinel Download Auxiliary files tool provided in the patch. The first execution will take some hours to repopulate the whole archive, but this procedure will avoid wasting space on disk. As of today, a full local copy of the archive requires about 18 GB of space.

In any case, if the Sentinel-1 import step requires an orbit file that is not available in the local orbit repository, SARscape will try to download it on-the-fly from the ESA portal.

For more details, please refer to the corresponding Help page or contact the support team.

 

Written by SARMAP, reviewed by CS, 2021/04/15