Nicolaus Copernicus Prussia also resisted the Polish crown's efforts for greater control over the region. "Encyclopædia Britannica", "Encyclopedia Americana", "The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia", "The Oxford World Encyclopedia", and "World Book Encyclopedia" refer to Copernicus as a "Polish astronomer". Sheila Rabin, writing in the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", describes Copernicus as a "child of a German family [who] was a subject of the Polish crown", while Manfred Weissenbacher writes that Copernicus's father was a Germanized Pole. There are additional arguments for Kopernik's Polish descent on his father's side. Kopernik's Y-DNA haplogroup, R1b L51, is found in southern Poland (in Silesia, where his father
Copernicus Programme Before the Sentinel missions provide data to Copernicus, numerous existing or planned space missions provide or will provide data useful to the provision of Copernicus services. (These missions are often referred to as ""GMES Contributing Missions (GCMs)"".) Data provided by non-European satellite missions (e.g. LANDSAT, GOSAT, RADARSAT-2) can also be used by Copernicus. GMES In-Situ Coordination (GISC). GISC is a FP7 funded initiative, will last for three years (January 2010 – December 2012) and is coordinated by the European Environment Agency (EEA). "In-situ" data are all data from sources other than Earth observation satellites. Consequently, all ground-based, air-borne, and ship/buoy-based