CNES projects library

January 15, 2019

Isis

Launched in 1994, CNES’s ISIS programme is giving European research laboratories the opportunity to gain access to SPOT and Pleiades imagery.

Through the ISIS programme (for Incitation à l’utilisation Scientifique des Images Spot), research scientists can access at preferential rates the 30 million images acquired by the SPOT satellites between 1986 and 2015, and very-high-resolution images from the Pleiades-1A and Pleiades-1B satellites launched in 2011 and 2012. They can also request tasking of the Pleiades satellites to acquire new imagery of areas of interest.

Since 2007, CNES has processed some 900 applications from hundreds of research scientists working at laboratories and higher education institutes in the European Union, and delivered more than 6,500 images. Three-quarters of these are archive imagery. All of them have been used for purely scientific purposes or to demonstrate the benefits of satellite imagery from Europe’s Copernicus environmental monitoring and security programme. They have supported a broad range of research work in such fields as silting in Eastern Morocco, modelling of ground displacements during major earthquakes, the value to birds and other wildlife of wetland areas in the Camargue, glacier monitoring, and the environmental impacts of shrimp farming in Mexico. In the future, some of these fields of study will be using satellite data on a regular basis.

SEE also

The ISIS website closed but the CNES ISIS program continues*. Institutional requests, including scientific ones, for Pleiades images (archive and programming) are now to be submitted via DINAMIS (National Institutional Device of Mutualized Supply in Space Imaging).

*Read more about it : End of ISIS-CNES website, new procedure request for SPOT 1-5 archive and Pleiades imagery – Theia (theia-land.fr)