How to get European Space Agency satellite imagery

The European Space Agency has made it a priority to make its vast collection of scientific data more easily available - especially to European citizens. One of the first large projects to implement the new data policy is the Earth Observation directorate's DISP or Data, Information and Services Portal - informally known as Earthnet Online. This portal, developed and operated by Netcetera, is an update and merger of two existing earth observation portals - the Earthnet communications platform and the principal investigator community or scientific investigation platform of the Earth Observation group. With the merger of these two sites and the integration of ESA's new enterprise-wide single sign on system - UM-SSO, it is quite easy to perform a simple one-time registration that allows access to gigabytes of scientific imagery. In this article we'll show a brief overview of the kind of data available and step through the process of registering to obtain it.