first published week of: 03/25/2013
Astrium, Europe's leading space technology company, has announced the operational and commercial launch of the fully complete Pléiades constellation as well as SPOT 6, following the successful in-orbit qualification of the Pléiades 1B and SPOT 6 satellites.
“Astrium Services will now distribute images from the twin Pléiades 1A and 1B satellites, operating as a fully-fledged constellation”, said Astrium Services CEO Evert Dudok. “This configuration, the only one of its kind in the world, offers very-high-resolution daily revisits and guarantees an image in less than 24 hours from any point on the globe, as well as daily monitoring of any location and double the coverage.”
It is this daily revisit capability that makes geo-information services a reliable part of the strategic and economic decision-making process, offering Astrium Services' customers a number of advantages. These are as follows: speedier access to images (war and crisis zones and natural disaster areas are visible in a matter of hours, anywhere in the world); the provision of images on a regular basis, enabling, for example, daily monitoring of activity at a specific location (rate of progress of civil engineering projects, surveillance of a military, industrial or mining sites, etc...); and twice the number of images (images are acquired twice as fast and with twice the chance of a cloud-free image being captured, making it the ideal configuration for mapping large areas).
Taken between 15 and 21 February 2013, this series of images of the port of Suez in Egypt perfectly illustrates the daily revisit potential of the Pléiades constellation. They show shipping activity, in particular the movement of ferries and commercial vessels at the entrance to the canal. All these images are available in jpeg or video stills at the website ftp://ftp.astrium-geo.com/satellite_2013/