SPOT5 (Take5) operational production is starting

Everything is set to start SPOT5 (Take 5) operational production of L1C products today (L1C products are ortho rectified images expressed in Top of Atmosphere reflectance). The Level 2A production will start a couple of days later, when all the L1C of April and May are produced (L2A products provide surface reflectances and cloud and cloud shadows masks). Karl Rodriguez and Patrick di Giovanni from Steria, and Eric Faucher from ME/PRM team at CNES are handling this production at the MUSCATE center in CNES (which is part of THEIA Land data center) All the parameters are tuned, and the last ones we obtained are those for the most Northern sites, for which the SRTM digital elevation model (DEM) is not available. Thankfully, we had access to the planetDEM DEM, which was already purchased by ESA in the framework of Sentinel-2. Planet DEM combines SRTM DEM for mid latitudes, and National DEMs above 60 degrees North. For this, we would like to thank ESA and the French  company « Planet Observer ». The geometrical performance for all the SPOT5 (Take5) images acquired in April was also checked by Gilles Doyon (Magellium), and it is good ! We only found a few scenes with a geo-location maximal error (for 90% of pixels) just a little greater than 1, but they usually correspond to very cloudy scenes, or sites where the LANDSAT reference images contain a large amount of clouds. 85% of the images have registration errors for the 67 best pixels below 0.5.