The Pléiades system is designed for a range of very-high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing applications. These include:

• 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 etc.)
• Defence: imagery-derived intelligence and tactical planning in urban/densely populated areas
• 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), harbour mapping
• Civil Engineering/Asset Monitoring: planning of road, rail and oil pipeline corridors
• 3D: flight simulators, high precision mapping, photovoltaic fields implantation

Equipped with innovative latest-generation space technologies like fibre-optic gyros and control moment gyros, Pléiades-HR 1A and 1B offer exceptional roll, pitch and yaw (slew) agility, enabling the system to maximise the number of acquisitions above a given area.

Agility for Responsive Tasking

The Pléiades system is very responsive to specific user requirements. Individual user requests are answered in record time, thanks to multiple programming plans per day and a state-of-the-art image processing chain:

• Image acquisition anywhere within an 800-km-wide ground strip with 70 cm of resolution
• Along-track stereo and tri-stereo image acquisition
• Single-pass collection of mosaics (strip-mapping) with a footprint up to a square degree
• Maximum theoretical acquisition capacity of 1,000,000 km2 per day and per satellite
• Optimised daily acquisition capacity (taking into account genuine order book, weather constraints, conflicts...) reaching 300,000 km₂ per day and per satellite.