Thursday, April 10, 2008

SPOT-5 Satellite Sensor Characteristics

Launch Date May 3, 2002
Launch Vehicle Ariane 4
Launch Location Guiana Space Centre, Kourou, French Guyana
Orbital Altitude 822 kilometers
Orbital Inclination 98.7°, sun-synchronous
Speed 7.4 Km/second (26,640 Km/hour)
Equator Crossing Time 10:30 AM (descending node)
Orbit Time 101.4 minutes
Revisit Time 2-3 days, depending on latitude
Swath Width 60 Km x 60 Km to 80 Km at nadir
Metric Accuracy <>
Digitization 8 bits
Resolution

Pan: 2.5m from 2 x 5m scenes

Pan: 5m (nadir)

MS: 10m (nadir)

SWI: 20m (nadir)

Image Bands

Pan: 480-710 nm

Green: 500-590 nm

Red: 610-680 nm

Near IR: 780-890 nm

Shortwave IR: 1,580-1,750 nm

About the SPOT-5 Satellite Sensor

The SPOT-5 Earth observation satellite was successfully placed into orbit by an Ariane 4 from the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou during the night of 3 to 4 May 2002.

The VEGETATION 2 passenger instrument on SPOT-5 also provides continuity of environmental monitoring around the globe, like its predecessor on SPOT-4.

SPOT Image Corporation is composed of four subsidiaries, including an office in Germany and a dense global network of receiving stations, channel partners, and distributors. Satellite Imaging Corporation is an official distributor for SPOT Image Corporation.

Compared to its predecessors, SPOT-5 offers greatly enhanced capabilities, which provide additional cost-effective imaging solutions. Thanks to SPOT-5's improved 5-metre and 2.5-metre resolution and wide imaging swath, which covers 60 x 60 km or 60 km x 120 km in twin-instrument mode, the SPOT-5 satellite provides an ideal balance between high resolution and wide-area coverage. The coverage offered by SPOT-5 is a key asset for applications such as medium-scale mapping (at 1:25 000 and 1:10 000 locally), urban and rural planning, oil and gas exploration, and natural disaster management. SPOT-5's other key feature is the unprecedented acquisition capability of the on-board HRS stereo viewing instrument, which can cover vast areas in a single pass. Stereo pair imagery is vital for applications that call for 3D terrain modeling and computer environments, such as flight simulator databases, pipeline corridors, and mobile phone network planning.