Airbus announces new Pléiades Neo Next program to expand its Earth observation constellation
TOULOUSE, France - Airbus in Toulouse, France announced it has launched the Pléiades Neo Next program to expand its very high-resolution Earth observation constellation. This new program will result in new satellite assets and capabilities, including enhanced native resolution. As a first step of Pléiades Neo Next, Airbus is developing a new satellite which will be launched in the next few years.
The Pléiades Neo Next program is funded, manufactured, and operated by Airbus Defence and Space, with the full image capacity available for a wide range of sectors including defense and intelligence, agriculture, environment, maritime, disaster response, mapping, location-based services, civil engineering, urban planning, and utilities.
“The Pléiades Neo Next program builds on the success of our existing Pléiades Neo constellation which serves government and commercial customers around the world,” said Karen Florschütz, Executive Vice President Connected Intelligence at Airbus Defence and Space. “This new program will further enhance our standard of excellence in terms of quality, performance, and reliability to deliver images as well as geo-intelligence services and applications.”
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Users will continue to be able to directly task the Airbus satellites up to a few dozen minutes prior to the satellite over the area of interest. Images will be received through the customer’s Direct Receiving Stations (DRS) on the ground, or on the OneAtlas digital platform, swiftly after collection, allowing mission-critical applications.
In addition to enhanced native resolution, Pléiades Neo Next development will further improve the ground segment, the DRS, and the OneAtlas platform, resulting in a higher capacity of imagery requests and optimizing the time between request, capture, and reception.
With Pléiades Neo Next, Airbus is reinforcing its Earth observation capabilities and services to remain at the forefront of geospatial technologies. The Airbus fleet includes both optical and radar satellite constellations ensuring complementarity services and applications, including various resolutions, all-weather, and day and night capabilities. In parallel, Airbus is developing new capabilities based on stratospheric platforms.
