ESA Signs Agreement With French Company

The European Space Agency has signed an agreement with the company that distributes data commercially from the French Space Agency’s Spot satellites.

The multi-year agreement with Spot Image SA permits the ESA to order more than 10,000 images per year from the Spot 1, 2, 3 and 4 satellites.

ESA Category-1 users from Europe, Canada and Africa can submit proposals for the use of the Spot data for research and development applications.

The agreement allows the Paris-headquartered ESA, for the first time, to offer high resolution optical data in large quantities from a non-ESA European mission to its Category-1 users.

In return for access to the data, the ESA will contribute to the operations of the Spot ESA shared ground receiving stations and processing facilities in Sweden and France, officials said.