Pleiades

The Pléiades system was designed under the French-Italian ORFEO program (Optical & Radar Federated Earth Observation) between 2001 and 2003.

Pléiades is an optical observation system consisting of two identical satellites that deliver 50cm colour products. Operating 180 degrees apart, on a phased orbit, the Pléiades system affords a daily revisit capability on any point of the globe, to better address civilian and military requirements.

The satellites have been designed with urgent tasking in mind; images can be requested from the Pléiades satellites less than six hours before they are acquired. This functionality will prove invaluable in situations where the expedited collection of new image data is crucial, such as crisis monitoring. This improved flexibility also leads itself to corridor and persistent surveillance acquisition modes.

The Pléiades section of the phased constellation comprises of Pléiades 1A – Launched December 16, 2011 and Pléiades 1B – Launched December 02, 2012

Resolution	Panchromatic 0.5m (resampled) Multispectral 2m (resampled)
Swath Width	20km
Products	Colour Pansharpened 0.5m (merge) Bundle 0.5m Panchromatic and 2m Multispectral
Bands	P: 470 – 830 nm Blue: 430 – 550 nm Green: 500 – 620 nm Red: 590 – 710 nm Near-infrared: 740 – 940 nm
Accuracy (No GCP’s)	3m CE90
Archive Availability	From APR 2012
Programmable?	Yes: Target collection, strip mapping, stereo & tristereo and multiple acquisitions over a single target in one pass
Minimum area of purchase	Archive = 25 sq km New Acquisition = 100 sq km (15% cloud cover or less is successful)
Stereo available?	Yes (Stereo and TriStereo Acquisition Mode)
Largest Scale	1:2,000
Dynamic Range	12 bits per pixel
Applications	Land planning: detection and identification of small features (e.g. vehicles, roads, bushes) Agriculture: land management and crop yields, location of crop diseases, tree count (palm trees, vineyards...) Defence: imagery-derived intelligence and tactical planning in urban/densely populated areas Homeland Security: mitigation, assistance in crisis events and post-crisis assessment (particularly earthquakes) Hydrology: topography and drainage basin gradient studies Forestry: illicit deforestation and management of forestry yields; REDD data qualification (sampling) Maritime and littoral surveillance: vessel reconnaissance and contamination (oil spill), harbor mapping Civil Engineering/Asset Monitoring: planning of road, rail and oil pipeline corridors 3D: flight simulators, high precision mapping, photovoltaic fields implantation...