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End of commercial operations of SPOT 4 satellite

On Friday, January 11, commercial operations of SPOT 4 satellite were terminated. The joint decision on stopping commercial operations of the satellite was made by the SPOT 4 owner – CNES (French Space Agency) and the satellite Operator – Astrium GEO-Information Services. The satellite has been operating for almost 15 years (177 months) from its launch in March 1998. Over 6.8 mln images of the Earth have been acquired since then.

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Nonetheless, SPOT space program keeps developing. ScanEx Research & Development Center carries on direct reception and processing of SPOT 5 satellite data (announced lifetime is until 2015). In addition, commercial operation of the new SPOT 6 satellite will start soon – its data was for the first time in Russia received and processed by ScanEx’s specialists on October 17, 2012 using “UniScan” ground station at the Moscow remote sensing center. Now UniScan ground stations can be supplied to the interested organizations for SPOT 6 data reception (and similar SPOT 7 satellite, which is to be launched in the first half of 2014), whereas the already installed stations can be upgraded. SPOT 6/7 data processing software has been developed by ScanEx RDC within the frames of the international cooperation with Astrium GEO-Information Services company.

ScanEx company has exclusive rights to receive and distribute SPOT series satellites’ data on the territory of Russia and Belarus.

Besides SPOT program Astrium GEO-Information Services is the worldwide commercial Operator of the very high resolution satellites Pleiades-1A and Pleiades-1B (the last one was successfully launched on December 2, 2012). In compliance with the signed distributor agreement with Astrium GEO-Information Services, ScanEx RDC started to accept orders for data from these satellites. ScanEx also is ready to review orders to set up data reception from Pleiades-1A and Pleiades-1B satellites to UniScan stations, as provided by the agreement with Astrium GEO-Information Services.

Source ScanEX