SpatialNews Press Release

SPOT Goes Virtual To Set New Delivery Standards

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RESTON, VA – SPOT Image Corporation completed system trials in which imagery was delivered from satellite to user in 4 hours or less. The tests involved both SPOT satellites 1 and 2, and were used to validate the Virtual Receiving Station (VRS) service concept to support agriculture, disaster response and other applications requiring dependable rapid delivery of information. SPOT is the world’s only imaging system capable of providing reliable rapid delivery on a consistent basis.

“The Virtual Receiving Station idea was born from our understanding of specific customer needs for quick and reliable access to very current information,” explains Gene Colabatistto, President of SPOT Image Corporation. “VRS allows us to deliver large amounts, or very targeted areas of current information over any North American area, directly to the client as though they had their own receiving station. We have been able to do this with the support and hard work of our partners at the Prince Albert, Canada receiving station.”

The trials were performed for a potential new agricultural information services client. SPOT’s multiple orbiting cameras (6 cameras on 3 satellites) maximize imaging opportunities worldwide, allowing daily coverage of any location on Earth. This allows SPOT to overcome cloud cover and competing system request conflicts during the very busy agricultural growing season.

The success of VRS/rapid delivery is facilitated by the new business arrangement with the Canadian receiving stations (Prince Albert and Gatineau), under which SPOT Image Corporation directly manages the relationship with the two receiving stations that capture North American SPOT satellite telemetry. Once the imagery is received, it goes through a series of pre-processing steps, and ultimately is delivered through an ftp site for integration into the customer’s information system.

SPOT Image Corporation, headquartered in Reston, VA, is the world’s leading supplier of satellite imagery/information databases, working with imagery resolutions that range from sub-one meter to one kilometer. The global SPOT satellite system includes multiple Earth observation satellites, 24 ground receiving stations worldwide, and more than 100 international distributors. SPOT is the most experienced provider of commercial satellite imagery and information products, with 15 years of continuous operations, and over 8 million archived images collected since 1986.

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