| Type | Private company |
|---|---|
| Genre | Satellite Products and Services Provider |
| Founded | 1982 |
| Headquarters | Toulouse, France |
| Key people | Hervé Buchwalter, CEO |
| Net income | 94 800 K€ (2007) |
| Employees | 244 |
| Website | www.spotimage.com |
Spot Image, a public limited company created in 1982 by the French Space Agency, Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), the IGN, and Space Manufacturers (Matra, Alcatel, SSC, etc.) is a subsidiary of EADS Astrium (99%). The company is the commercial operator for the SPOT Earth observation satellites.
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Spot Image is a worldwide distributor of products and services using imagery from Earth observation satellites and works through a network of subsidiaries, local offices (Australia, Brazil, China, United States, Japan, Peru, Singapore), and partners. The goal is to provide on-the-spot service with worldwide availability.
Spot Image works with a network of more than 30 direct receiving stations handling images acquired by the SPOT satellites.
Spot Image collaborates with ESA’s GMES programme, shares geographic information with the OGC and contributes to the interoperability of web services; with Infoterra Global it continues to offer services for precision-agriculture.
The 2 SPOT satellites in orbit (Spot 4 and 5) provide images with a large choice of resolutions – from 2.5 m to 10 m. Spot Image also distributes multiresolution data from other optical satellites, in particular from Formosat-2 (Taiwan) and Kompsat-2 (South Korea), for which it has exclusive distribution rights, and from radar satellites (TerraSar-X, ERS, Envisat, Radarsat). Spot Image will also be the exclusive distributor of data from the forthcoming very-high resolution Pleiades satellites. The launch of Pléiades-1, via a Soyuz rocket, was confirmed on December 16, 2011. The second (Pléiades-2) is planned for mid-2012. Spot Image also offers infrastructures for receiving and processing, as well as added value options.
In addition to images, Spot Image proposes innovative added-value products to meet new user-needs:
Among the services offered by Spot Image:
On-line services:
Its goal is to encourage the Earth observation industry and geographic information professionals to support local projects searching for adaptive solutions to climate change problems. The products and materials available to these professionals – satellite images, geographic information systems, image processing and display software – are indispensable for studying the impact of global warming on our planet, on local and global scales. Planet Action supports projects that study: