[1] Designed as a dual civil/military system, Pléiades will meet the space imagery requirements of European defence as well as civil and commercial needs.

The Pléiades system was designed under the French-Italian ORFEO Programme (Optical and Radar Federated Earth Observation) between 2001 and 2003.

This agility coupled with particularly dynamic image acquisition programming make the Pléiades system very responsive to specific user requirements.

Individual user requests was answered in record time, thanks to multiple programming plans per day and a state-of-the-art image processing chain.

The Pléiades tasking plan are refreshed and uploaded three times per day, allowing for last minute requests and the ability to utilize up-to-the-minute weather forecasts.