The French space agency CNES handed over responsibility for commercial operation of SPOT 5 to SPOT IMAGE, which will now be distributing imagery acquired by the new satellite worldwide. After being placed in orbit by an Ariane 4 launcher on 4 May 2002 from the Guiana Space Centre, Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, SPOT 5 has successfully completed two months of in-orbit tests and is now fully operational. Since being placed in orbit, SPOT 5 has already acquired 23, 000 scenes.

Tests performed during in-orbit checkout have shown that: