Astrium has announced the operational and commercial launch of the fully complete Pleiades constellation as well as SPOT 6, following the successful in-orbit qualification of the Pleiades 1B and SPOT 6 satellites.

"Astrium Services will now distribute images from the twin Pleiades 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 Pleiades constellation. They show shipping activity, in particular the movement of ferries and commercial vessels at the entrance to the canal.

Pleiades 1A and 1B are Europe's first very-high-resolution Earth-observation satellites, and are positioned 180 degrees apart in the same quasi-polar heliosynchronous orbit, at an altitude of 695 km. They offer exceptional performance in the civil market: 50 cm products over a 20 km footprint and excellent flexibility (rapid pointing) allowing multiple acquisition modes (stereo, mosaic, corridor, target). Thanks to their unparalleled ability to acquire 900 images a day, they also offer major operational advantages to users.

The SPOT 6 and SPOT 7 constellation will operate in conjunction with Pleiades and will offer 1.5 m resolution data over larger imaging swaths (60 km) for mapping very large areas.

The Pleiades (1A and 1B) and SPOT 6 and 7 constellations will be stationed at equidistant points in the same orbit around the Earth, making Astrium Services the first operator in the world able to offer a complete range of Earth-observation data at different resolutions (from medium to very high resolution). What this means is that every point of the globe will now be visible in high and very-high resolution on a daily basis.