The origins of SNAP can be traced back to 2003, when ESA developed a toolbox – named BEAM – to view and process optical data from the agency’s ERS and Envisat missions.

A few years later, ESA began work on a new tool called NEST for processing and analysing ESA and third-party synthetic aperture radar data, which became available in 2007.

For almost seven years these tools were developed in parallel with separate codebases but, at the dawn of the Copernicus Sentinel era, ESA began merging them into a single platform – and, in 2014, this gave rise to SNAP, simplifying both the development and usage of the toolboxes. The functionality of the predecessor toolboxes is now part of SNAP, and new functionality is added in a modular manner.

Since its launch, ESA has worked to ensure that SNAP is continually improved to meet the needs of its expanding user base.

SNAP and other ESA toolboxes can be accessed via the Science Toolbox Exploitation Platform (STEP) website, which also hosts the SNAP discussion forum with 10000+ registered users, as well as documentation, tutorials, third-party plugins and so on.

A new version, SNAP 9.0, is due to be released the week after the Living Planet Symposium. It contains a multitude of new functions, as well bug fixes, and usability and performance enhancements.

SNAP is currently developed by a consortium that includes Brockmann Consult GmbH (DE), CS France (FR), CS Romania (RO), SenSar (NL) and SkyWatch (CA).