[Vineyard & Winery Elf EN](https://help.vineyardelf.com/index.md) / [VineyardElf](https://help.vineyardelf.com/vineyardelf.md)

# [What is NanoSatelity](https://help.vineyardelf.com/what-is-nanosatelity.md)

NanoSatelity is the third product in the Elf family, alongside VineyardElf and WineryElf. It gives you a view of your vineyard from orbit - literally.

We use free data from the Sentinel-2 satellite (the Copernicus programme, ESA). The satellite passes over Europe every 2-5 days and photographs the surface in multiple spectral bands, including near-infrared. From those bands we compute indices that tell you about the condition of your plants - without walking between the rows.

## What the satellite measures

The core index is NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index). It is calculated from two bands: red (B04) and near-infrared (B08). Healthy, green plants reflect infrared strongly, while stressed or dry ones reflect it weakly. Hence the scale:

- below 0.2 - bare ground, no vegetation
- 0.2-0.4 - weak vegetation, early spring or stress
- 0.4-0.6 - moderate condition
- above 0.6 - lush, healthy vegetation

Besides NDVI we also measure NDWI (water stress) and NDMI (leaf moisture). Together they give a complete picture of what is happening across the vineyard.

## Resolution

Sentinel-2 photographs at a resolution of 10 metres per pixel. For a 0.5-hectare vineyard that is roughly 50 pixels - enough to see differences between parcels, but not individual rows. That is why NanoSatelity works best for comparing blocks and tracking changes over time.

## Where the data comes from

We pull the data from Copernicus Dataspace - ESA's official platform. The free tier provides 30,000 processing units per month, which is enough for daily monitoring of several vineyards. No hardware is required - just an account at dataspace.copernicus.eu.