SPOT

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International collaboration: Summarising ESA’s Third Party Missions

ESA’s Third Party Missions programme consists of more than 50 missions from around the world. Learn more about the Third Party Missions in this video.

Long-term data: Summarising ESA’s Heritage missions

ESA’s Heritage Space Programme preserves data from non-operational missions. Learn more about the Heritage missions in this video.

Showcasing success stories from ESA's Third Party Missions

ESA’s Third Party Missions programme consists of more than 50 missions from around the world.

Global understanding of Earth's land surfaces greatly boosted by satellite data

ESA perform land surface monitoring with a range of instruments onboard satellites acquiring optical and radar data. Collections of data from these missions are freely available for research purposes.

New worldwide dataset captures the planet in fine detail

Scientists have developed an open source planetwide dataset of high-resolution Earth observation imagery, thanks to commercial data delivered by ESA’s Third Party Missions (TPM) programme.

About SPOT Series

The SPOT (from French "Satellite pour l'Observation de la Terre") series has been supplying high-resolution, wide-area optical imagery since 1986. Conceived by the French National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), five satellites were launched between 1986 and 2015, and in revealing Earth’s surface in detail they led to new applications in mapping, vegetation monitoring, land use and land cover, and the impacts of natural disasters.

The latest satellites in the series, SPOT 6 and SPOT 7, are commercial satellites owned by Airbus Defence and Space, and assure data continuity through to 2024.

All of the SPOT satellites provide imagery in panchromatic and multispectral bands with a swath of 60 km.

The SPOT series is part of ESA's Third Party Missions Programme, in which ESA has an agreement with Airbus Defence and Space to distribute data products from the mission.

SPOT Series Objectives

The goal of the SPOT series is to improve the knowledge and management of Earth by exploring the planet's resources, detecting and forecasting phenomena involving climatology and oceanography, and monitoring human activities and natural phenomena.