Belgium has been co-operating with France on Earth Observation since 1979. This co-operation takes the form of an intergovernmental agreement on the development of the SPOT 1 
satellite, launched in 1986, and its successors. Sweden is also co-operating in this programme. The agreement implementation is entrusted to the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office and to the CNES (French National Space Research Centre).
The SPOT programme targeted the distribution and exploitation of satellite imagery: the data were distributed via a private firm, Spot-Image, a French company specifically created for this purpose which was open to international capital (including the Belgian State and several national manufacturers). For Belgium, not the high resolution images were of utmost importance, but rather the images captured by the VEGETATION instrument onboard the SPOT 4 and SPOT 5 satellites. This instrument allows to map the worldwide vegetation roughly once a day, with a resolution of approximately 1km2, in 4 spectral bands. This collaboration with France led to the development of the Centre de Traitement et d'archivage des Images VEGETATION or CTIV hosted at VITO in Mol. This centre later evolved into the Centrum voor Beeldverwerking (CvB ). During the programme, the role of the CvB became more important and it ultimately also became the distribution center and thus took over the role of direct contact point with the VEGETATION customers. This successful collaboration was the basis for the continuation of the VEGETATION programme via the Belgian Proba-V satellite and for further collaborations with France, in the framework of the Pléiades, Myriades and Musis programmes.
Belgium joined the French programme for Earth Observation "Pléiades" in 2004. The Belgian participation to the French Pleiades programme consisted on the one hand of important industrial developments, like the satellite platform by the Belgian company Sonaca, and on the other hand the continuous access to the high resolution satellite images and the satellite programming, by Belgian actors (including Defense).
Find out more about the Pleiades programme...
The Musis programme is a French-Belgian military collaboration. The Musis satellite also is a high resolution French Earth observation satellite.
Agnes Grandjean
Space Research & Applications
