SPOT 6 and SPOT 7

SPOT 6 and SPOT 7 are a pair of commercial Earth observation satellites that carry on the French SPOT imaging series after SPOT 5. Airbus Defence and Space operates them, having previously done so as Astrium Services, and they were launched on Indian PSLV rockets in 2012 and 2014. Each carries two NAOMI pushbroom imagers built around Korsch telescopes with silicon carbide mirrors, giving 2 metre panchromatic and 8 metre multispectral images over a 60 kilometre swath. The twins fly 180 degrees apart in a sun-synchronous orbit at about 694 kilometres on the AstroBus-L platform, whose control moment gyroscopes let them pitch and roll quickly enough to image several strips in one pass. In December 2014 ownership of SPOT 7 passed to Azercosmos of Azerbaijan, which renamed it Azersky, and it failed in orbit on 17 March 2023, leaving SPOT 6 to serve customers alone.