End of the commercial exploitation of Spot-5 satellite on March 27, 2015
End of the commercial exploitation of Spot-5 satellite
on March 27, 2015
Nearly final point of a great adventure begun in 1986 with SPOT 1, after nearly 13 years of good and loyal services, SPOT 5 commercial mission was stopped on March 27, 2015.
But SPOT 5 isn't dead yet: following the success of TAKE5 experiment on SPOT 4, a new edition, co-funded by ESA, was decided on SPOT 5.
The objective of this end of life experiment, as the previous one, is to prepare the arrival of ESA's SENTINEL-2 satellites (launches scheduled for June 2015 and 2016). It's objective is to put SPOT 5 on a high revisit orbit (5 days) and to acquire about 150 predefined sites every 5 days during 5 months, meaning 30 acquisitions of each site, in order to monitor the evolution of the vegetation and summer crops.
On April 2, SPOT 5 orbit was lowered by 2.5 km in order to reach an orbit at 820 km with a 5 days revisit.
After a period of intense preparation, the TAKE 5 images will be programmed by the mission engineers from the SPOT CMP for the complete duration of the operation (until beginning of September). The first images are expected on April 8.
A short animation to explain the use of this Take 5 experiment: