September 19, 2014

Characteristics of the ORFEO system

The ORFEO dual system must ensure:

  • the protection of defence interests in terms of security and priority given to mission requests,
  • that civilian or commercial users' needs are satisfied in terms of general operational capacity, quick access to data, image availability and quality and the competitiveness of the services provided.

Users

Use of the ORFEO dual system (particularly Pleiades) is open to several categories of users: public, institutional, private and commercial. The system must also supply services to users who come under the authority of the French and Italian Defence Ministries.
For this purpose, the following constraints, which are strictly related to Defence requirements, must be complied with:

  • Priority in the planning of daily missions:
    • mission requests issued by the Defence ministries will be given priority,
    • in emergency situations, however, requests from the French and/or Italian governments will be considered as extremely urgent cases, and the ORFEO system must be able to program the mission until the request has been met and process the data supplied by the satellite as quickly as possible, before it deals with any other requests, including those from the Defence ministries;

  • Data access

Users under the authority of the Defence ministries will have free access to the raw data of the civilian archives.
Data acquired by the Defence ministries will be classified. However, products resulting from the specific requirements of these ministries may, where applicable, be supplied to commercial or private users once the degradation and declassification process has been applied.