SNAP is the common software platform for the three Sentinel Toolboxes which are developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) for the scientific exploitation of the Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 missions.
The project page of SNAP and the sentinel toolboxes can be found at http://step.esa.int. There you will find a tutorial about the usage of the application, a forum where you can ask questions and lots of other interesting things.
The intention of the development is to primarily support the Sentinel missions for not only research but also in an operational context. In addition, a great deal of the development will be to improve and produce a common application platform for all toolboxes for the next 10 years.
ESA is developing three new free open source toolboxes for the scientific exploitation of the Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 missions.
The Toolboxes will be based on the proven BEAM/NEST architecture inheriting all current BEAM and NEST functionality including multi-mission support for SAR and optical missions and provide an evolutionary update to the architecture to support ESA and third party missions for years to come. In practical terms this means that all three toolboxes will be based on the extension of the existing open source BEAM and NEST toolbox framework. We will be restructuring all the code from BEAM and NEST into this common Sentinel framework. The common platform will be jointly developed by Array (S-1), C-S (S-2) and Brockmann Consult (S-3). The project will run through the next two years with releases every four months. The first public release of the software will be available in September 2014 and be released under GNU GPL open source license.
This work is funded through the Scientific Exploitation of Operational Missions (SEOM) a new program element of ESA's fourth period of the Earth Observation Envelope Programme (2013-2017), referred to as EOEP-4.
EOEP-4 will pursue a long-term exploitation strategy and address the broad and growing spectrum of EO user communities, including science, applications and services development.
How SNAP and the toolboxes can be built from source is documented in our Developer Guide.