Pleiades Neo Launches with 30 CM Resolutions

In a recent Media News Briefing and Q&A session with Airbus Defence and Space, SVP Head of Earth Observation, Navigation and Science, Philippe Pham & Director of Intelligence Business François Lombard discussed the announcement of Pleiades Neo. The company is reshaping earth observation services and geospatial services by introducing Pleiades Neo, their first satellite.

Evergreen in the Suez Canal, image courtesy of Airbus Defence & Space

Phillipe Pham: It is a big relief that the launch lift off yesterday evening, a very smooth flight, putting us in the right orbit with right accuracy. Nice for all teams and a big relief.

François Lombard  – I am very proud of the team, it has long time years of work. Almost 1,000 people working on that project, and we’ve been waiting for some time to get it into orbit.

The genesis of the program officially started in 2016 when we announced to the world that we had the idea to fully finance a constellation of four satellites at 30 CM resolutions with innovations we could bring from the other side. Years of work together with the customer, coupled with our long time presence in this market all around the world. We worked with them on what they actually needed and to tried to find the sweet spot in the market. In 2016 we decided to launch it. Basically the main focus areas were based on the main feedback we got from the market which is fully true today. People basically needed more data at very high quality, with much easier access. It means many things: you to be at the top of market in terms of resolutions, the top of what you can do in the commercial market and this is where we decided to move for this type of resolution. We decided also to go for the highest quality we could so it’s not only about the resolution it’s also about the quality of the image agility of the satellite, bringing the quality to the world and a high volume.

Evergreen in the Suez Canal, image courtesy of Airbus Defence & Space

Other things we saw at the time which have been confirmed to be true, more new technologies on the ground are using artificial intelligence using the cloud, a lot of processing that enable you to  do a lot faster. Which makes it possible to use much more of a volume of data. We do it this way and design everything to be ready for that and to interface digitally with our customers. It’s not only in the satellites, it is a lot on the ground and I feel very comfortable today that we are on the right spot with the launch of this first satellite. This is only the first one but the next ones will come.

Phillipe Pham: We are fully aware of the market trends, customer expectations, but are so building on the legacy of our capacities. We’ve been here for 35 plus years. We designed the cross competitive, powerful and competitive performing end-to-end system, meaning both the satellite and the ground system. For the satellite, it’s a bunch of requirements we have to take into account, with respect to resolution, capacity of collection, capacity of storage, a very efficient time loop with uplink and downlink to a spacecraft and also to downlink imagery, but also to distribute the services to our customers having also a revisit capacity, in trade with similar and very exact revisit capacities on the same spot. And then on the ground as mentioned, taking into account the latest technologies implementing the cloud platform capability, both private and public, being able to have a very powerful on-the-fly processing and distribution for our customers, and building on our market services capacity. Since it’s an Airbus full investment, having a very balanced and competitive business case, to make sure between the building of the infrastructure and the delivery of the services, we will have a bright future.

Questions from the audience followed.

What is the total investment of Airbus in the project?

Phillipe Pham: We are always investing especially in the ground signals; I would say altogether the four satellites plus some of the key features were in the range of €6-700 million which has been also many times shared to a certain extent. So it’s a big investment and we are very comfortable we’re in the right spot.

Without giving secrets away, most of the first customers we had were in the private sector which is a trend which is a bit different than we would have seen 10 years ago. The push was not coming from the private side 10 years ago.  We have one big contract with a Chinese company which is looking at the specific Chinese market for we have some contracts in the U.S. Lot of contracts are close to signature in all areas of the world.

When do you expect to see first light?

François Lombard: We are carrying out the first checkup of the satellite’s health status. We have a few operations in the coming days and first images available early next week.

A quick status: the imagery market is a service market that has an up and down level of volatility. It has some movement from the Covid crisis, but is very productive. In terms of changes in this market, the top of the market is high resolution — this is the sweet spot, this is where is you have the highest value and demand. Other segments in the market are interesting. Some low level constellations are useful as well, there is use of more and more volume of data, with artificial intelligence, so it’s not again about a lot of opportunities in the downstream markets, which is solutions for the end user partially in defense, partially in the private sector. This market is big but still emerging a lot  I think this is the market that people are looking at that is very hungry on data. They want companies to change a bit to ease the access to data. The French president said there is a lot to do in the downstream part.

Can you tell us who the key players are in that market and do you have any ratio of who owns what?

In the very high resolution market Maxwell and ELBus are key players, 30 centimeter for ELBus. They are two very strong players with market access. Planet, Black Sky, and others are dealing with optical data and radar data. There are constellations from Italy from GEOS, and many others.

When you talk about 30 centimeters, what technical allotments are we to expect in the next few years? What resolution for military satellites?

Phillipe Pham: We are constantly pushing the limits with respect for performance of our satellites. This performance is coming from our system parameters, the size of the spacecraft, the use of technology, the altitude for observation. Currently the 30 centimeter or a little bit below is really a sweet spot where you have a nice compromise between the size of the satellite, the size of the instruments and mirror and the overall cost of getting the satellite up in orbit and operated over 10 years. For the next decade we will continue to push the limits in resolutions to be able to capture more square kilometers to be more real time, to miniaturize the size of the spacecraft to be even more launch competitive. There is a physical limit as well. You have a satellite, given altitude, given size of optics then it’s given a price to get there.

We are working on having complimentary capacities, or other complimentary observation platforms, which will have resolution video, further specific capacities that are local less global etc. It’s a bunch of capacities that you will use to get more data to provide more resolution and more services to more customers.

Tags: cloud, data, geospatial, GIS, GNSS, imagery, Infrastructure, intelligence, laser scanner, LiDAR, navigation, remote sensing, satellite imagery

Categories: Airbus Defense and Space, analytics, Big Data, citizen science, climate change, cloud, cloud network analytics, data, emergency response, field GIS, geospatial, GIS, global aircraft surveillance, image-delivery software, laser radar, lidar, location based sensor fusion, location based services, location intelligence, photogrammetry, remote sensing

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