The building of LOFAR Latvia from space

© CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO ESA

This time-lapse, consisting of photos from the Copernicus SENTINEL-2 mission, shows the build process of the Latvian LOFAR station LV-614 in Irbene. The satellite that took these photos was at an altitude of about 800km, which explains the not so great resolution.

The different stages in the preparation of the land are nicely visible: cutting woods (August 2018), preparing an flattened area with yellow sand (December 2018), and putting two types gravel on it (March to May 2019, quite a bit more than necessary or desirable, in this case). Even the roll-out of the HBA tiles is visible (July and August 2019), as well as the moment the white lettering was put on top (October 2019) - it reads "VIRAC LOFAR-LATVIA LV-614", though this is not visible at this resolution.

Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2018-2020 processed by Sentinel Hub. To play with this data, you can visit https://sentinelshare.page.link/yXZZ