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Spot 5 - Service Continuity and Performance

Berlin/Toulouse, le 01 mai 2002

A new member has been added to the family of earth observation satellites: the three-ton Spot 5, which was developed and built by Europe's space company Astrium for the French Space Agency CNES. Spot 5 was fully assembled and tested in Toulouse, at Astrium premises and Intespace (Cnes' test center).

CNES initiated the Spot programme already in the seventies, and the first satellite of the Spot constellation was launched in 1986. Since then, SpotImage, a subsidiary of CNES and Astrium, has been offering earth observation services, in particular, in the fields of mapping, resource management, environmental monitoring, agriculture and now for the growing telecommunications needs with the advanced Spot 5 instruments. Four instruments permit to address this broad range of applications: the high-resolution HRG cameras, the stereo HRS camera, the wide-field instrument Vegetation2 and Doris for highly accurate satellite orbit and position determination.

Spot 5 was developed in close liaison with the Helios 2 military observation programme, which generates significant savings for each of these projects. As the last member of the SPOT series, Spot 5 benefits from improvements such as the 90 Gbits solid-state mass memory, the very accurate star sensor for images localisation, the higher resolution of the HRG maeras and the stereoscopic instrument HRS.

The HRG (High Geometrical Resolution) cameras allow the generation of 2,5 m panchromatic images, 10 m multispectral images and 20 m images when using the IR channel, over a 60 km swath width for each instrument. Furthermore, both HRG are fitted with a +/- 27° cross-track viewing capability which adds to the system opertional capability.

The HRS (High Resolution Stereoscopic) instrument is composed of an aft and a fore camera. The quasi-instantaneous imaging of the same area by both cameras allows the generation of three-dimensional images leading to 120 kilometres wide by 600 kilometres long scenes of decametric resolution. HRS can cover six million square kilometres every year. HRS is also a good example of Public/Private Partnership, as Astrium financed a large part of the instrument development phase which shall be reimbursed by the sales of digital terrain models.

The satellite design allows five simultaneous imaging sequences, three of which can be recorded on-board and two transmitted to a ground station in real-time. The on-board solid-state memory can store up to 550 images daily.

Berlin, May 2002/02017

For further information:

Astrium
Earth Observation & Science
Mathias Pikelj
Tel.: +49-7545-8-9123
Fax: +49-7545-8-5589
presse-eo@astrium-space.com Internet: http://www.astrium-space.com
www.Astrium-Space.com