Astrium Services and Chinese provider of satellite data and value-added services, Beijing Eastdawn Information Technology (Eastdawn), have signed a partnership agreement to give Eastdawn access to Pleiades solutions and technologies.

This three year contract (with the possibility to extend for an extra two years) will enable Eastdawn to distribute 50-cm resolution products from the Pleiades constellation, as well as innovative services.

These products will support near-real-time applications to five key accounts in China (Ministry of Land Resources; National Administration for Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation; China Geological Survey; Ministry of Agriculture; and Ministry of Housing and Urban-rural Development) on an exclusive basis.

This new partnership agreement demonstrates Eastdawn's commitment to Pleiades. The company, investing in reception infrastructure, will operate three receiving stations to meet the needs of clients over the vast Chinese territory.

"China has leveraged the benefits of very high resolution satellite data since the beginning of the century to conduct land resource surveys and urban planning. Eastdawn will build on this tradition and work closely with our domestic remote sensing community," declared Mr. Bing Sun, President and CEO of Eastdawn.

"Pleiades will be the right solution to meet the needs of our target market. We believe our partnering with Astrium Services will help provide the Chinese government and key businesses with quality geospatial information in a timely and convenient manner to address applications such as land resource surveys, mapping, geosciences, agricultural assessment and urban planning."

"Pleiades' agility and multiple acquisition modes make this constellation particularly responsive to specific user requirements," said Patrick Le Roch, GEO-Information Director at Astrium Services, "For urban planning, natural resources management and mapping in China, Pleiades will offer the possibility to zoom in on densely populated areas for greater detail."

The upcoming constellation is based on four satellites: Pleiades 1 and Pleaides 2, two very-high-resolution satellites delivering 50-cm ortho colour products as a standard, and SPOT 6 and 7, designed to extend SPOT 5's success to the 1.5-m product family.

Phased on the same orbit, the constellation will enjoy unprecedented reactivity, with intra-day revisit capacity anywhere on the Earth.

Multiple tasking plans per day result in an unrivalled optimization of data collection: unforeseen weather changes, as well as last-minute requests, can be taken into account for a first-class level of service.

With four new optical imaging satellites to launch over the next three years, Astrium Services, through its extensive geo-information range of offering, is gearing up to bring its customers the best that space technology has to offer, ensuring continuity of service up to 2023.