INDUSTRY INTERVIEW
Geospatial Intelligence Forum
Antoine de Chassy President Astrium GEO-Information Services North America Q: You just had the successful launch of the Pléiades satellite, can you tell us a little about the program and the capabilities of the new satellite? A: Pléiades 1, which launched in December 2011, is the first of a two-satellite constellation. It will be followed later this year by its twin, Pléiades 2. Together, they will operate in a phased orbit, allowing for daily revisit to any place on the globe. With Pléiades, we will provide orthorectified, 50-centimeter resolution products as a standard. Our clients will have multiple products to choose from, including black and white, color, ortho or raw data, all for the same price. Stereo and tri-stereo products are also available and will be used to create high precision digital elevation models. With an imaging capacity of 2 million square kilometers per day, with two satellites, five acquisition scenarios and three daily tasking plans, the Pléiades system is built to deliver precise geospatial information in record time. Q: Will there be any other satellite launches in the near future? A: As a complement to the Pléiades constellation, we are launching SPOT 6 later this year, followed shortly thereafter by SPOT 7. These satellites will provide world class 1.5 meter resolution imagery and maintain the 60-kilometer swath that the current SPOT satellites are known for. By integrating the two constellations, we will be the only commercial provider with the capability to bring our customers intraday satellite imagery revisits anywhere on the globe, every day of the week.
new acquisitions. At the same time, we will have plenty of capacity to meet the needs of defense users, and provide each sector with the quality of products and service delivery they have come to expect from Astrium Services for more than 25 years. Q: How will your offer differ to meet the demand for services?
geo-information and provide decision support to the GEOINT community better than any other single provider in the industry. Q: How soon do you anticipate having Pléiades imagery available to customers? A: Just three days after the launch, we started receiving and releasing great images for everyone to view. Images of Washington, D.C., Dubai, Davis-Monthan AFB, Ariz., and others can be found on our website. The images are truly fantastic and the satellite is working well. We expect commercial operations and the first tasking orders to be taken at the beginning of March. With an expected accuracy of 4.5 meters CE 90, we will be able to deliver the first high quality 50 cm imagery products with a 20 km swath. This will enable the GEOINT community to observe and interpret larger areas of interest in a single satellite pass and provide a greater level of decision support.
Q: Don’t you have access to radar imagery as well?
Q: How will you differentiate yourselves from the existing high-resolution imagery providers?
A: We operate two synthetic aperture radar satellites, TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X, that allow for day and night collection regardless of weather and clouds. With this suite of earth observation satellites, we have an unprecedented capability, which will allow us to provide near real-time
A: The real differentiator will be in our ability to deliver. There is a demand in the market for high resolution data that is not being met. We will meet this demand with a strong dedication to both commercial and government users alike. Commercial users will no longer have to wait in line for
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A: The fundamental difference will be the range of services available for our customers. Everything from the satellite to the ground operations to the ordering system has been designed with maximum responsiveness in mind. For instance, a lot of work has gone into designing image production systems. The fully automatic orthorectification process is capable of generating a 20 km by 20 km color image in less than 30 minutes and a single-pass mosaic of 60 km by 60 km in two to three hours. On the user side, everything from ordering to data delivery has been made as flexible and easy as possible. New acquisitions, catalog data, subscription offers, online monitoring services and more mean that imagery is just a click away and ready to use. Q: With programs such as the EnhancedView program facing possible serious budget cuts, how do you see the future of commercial satellite imagery for defense and other government agencies? A: There is no doubt that the intelligence community and our industry will be significantly impacted by these cuts. However, we are not just delivering pixels anymore. There are clear opportunities out there in fields such as data on demand and monitoring delivered through cloud computing and online services. Multi-intelligence analysis and processing [UAV data with EO and SAR imagery] and bundled offers, such as GEOINT plus secured communication plus information security solutions, are needed as well. We have existing and proven capacity to build these offers, so there is still a strong future for commercial satellite imagery for defense and government agencies. O www.GIF-kmi.com