By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News

A Soyuz rocket has launched from French Guiana with the first satellite in the European Union's new multi-billion-euro Earth-observation programme.

The Sentinel-1a spacecraft has been put in orbit on a mission to map the planet's surface using radar.

It will be followed by a fleet of other satellites - also called Sentinels - over the next five years.

Brussels is describing its Copernicus programme as the biggest ever effort to characterise our world.

When the full satellite system is operational, it will be producing daily some eight terabytes of data to detail the state of Earth's land surface, its oceans and its atmosphere.
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more: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26875544