Pleiades

Pleiades is a satellite constellation providing very high-resolution optical imagery and is owned by Airbus. It is now possible to purchase, order and access Pleiades data using Sentinel Hub (SH).
About Pleiades data
Mission information
Pléiades is composed of two twin satellites orbiting the Earth 180° apart. The satellites deliver 0.5 m optical imagery and offer a daily revisit capability to any point on the globe. Data acquisition must be tasked, data is not acquired systematically. Pleiades' satellites share the orbit with SPOT satellites, which makes it possible to combine the data form both sources.
The Pléiades data with its high spatial resolution is suitable for a range of remote sensing applications such as vegetation monitoring, precise mapping, risk and disaster management.
Basic facts
Property | Info |
---|---|
Spatial resolution | 0.5 m for panchromatic band and 2 m for all other bands |
Sensor | Multispectral Imager, 5 bands: panchromatic, Blue, Red, Green and Near-Infrared band |
Revisit time | Up to a daily revisit of any point on the globe. Data acquisition must be tasked, data is not acquired systematically |
Spatial coverage | global |
Data availability | Since December 2011 |
Measurement | Top of the atmosphere (TOA) reflectance |
Common usage/purpose | vegetation monitoring, risk and disaster management, urban and mapping applications, civil engineering |
More information:
Attribution and use
The Pleiades products are released under the license available here.
Purchasing Pleiades data
The process of purchasing of Pleiades data in Sentinel Hub goes as follows:
- Check the pricing and conditions. If you would like to buy bigger area send us an e-mail and we will prepare a custom offer.
- Go to the "Billing" section in your SH Dashboard and buy the Airbus Pleiades plan.
- Once the payment is processed, we will send you a confirmation and you will be able to proceed with ordering the data.
Ordering Pleiades data
To order Pleiades data, please use our Third Party Import Data API. When ordering products, your area of interest must intersect by at least 0.1 km2 with each product, because of Airbus restrictions. Minimum billed order is 0.25 km2. You can order smaller areas, however, you will be billed for the minimum area. Please note that you can only order the already acquired data, while tasking your own Pleiades data acquisitions is not currently possible through Sentinel Hub.
SH uses the following settings when ordering Pleiades data:
Provider's parameter / tool | The values used by SH for ordering |
---|---|
product type | bundle |
radiometric processing | REFLECTANCE |
crs | UTM zone corresponding to user defined bounds |
processing level | SENSOR or ALBUM |
More information:
Note: If you would need any other Pleiades product, please contact us.
Once your order is successfully finished the ordered data will be available in one of your BYOC collections and ready to be used. To access the data you will need the id of this collection.
Accessing Pleiades data
Accessing of the PlanetScope data is similar to accessing any other BYOC data. All processing and filtering options listed there can be used. However, the settings specific for accessing of Pleiades data are listed below.
Endpoint Locations
Service | Notes |
---|---|
https://services.sentinel-hub.com/ | Contains the data purchased by individual user |
Filtering Options
collectionId
Use the id of the BYOC collection into which your Pleiades data was delivered as a value of parameter input.data.type
in the process
API requests. See BYOC data access for more information.
Available Bands and Data
This chapter will explain the bands and data which can be set in the evalscript input object:
Any string listed in the column Name can be an element of the input.bands
array in your evalscript.
Name | Description | Resolution |
---|---|---|
B0 | Blue, 430-550 nm | 2m |
B1 | Green, 490-610 nm | 2m |
B2 | Red, 600-720 nm | 2m |
B3 | Near Infrared, 750-950 nm | 2m |
PAN | Panchromatic, 480-830 nm | 0.5m |
dataMask | The mask of data/no data pixels (more). | N/A** |
Units
The data values for each band in your custom script are presented in the units as specified here. In case more than one unit is available for a given band, you may optionally set the value of input.units
in your evalscript setup
function to one of the values in the Sentinel Hub Units
column. Doing so will present data in that unit. The Sentinel Hub units
parameter combines the physical quantity and corresponding units of measurement values. As such, some names more closely resemble physical quantities, others resemble units of measurement.
The Source Format
specifies how and with what precision the digital numbers (DN
) from which the unit is derived are encoded. Bands requested in DN
units contain the pixel values which are the result of ordering and preprocessing the data as explained in the chapter Ordering Pleiades data. Note that resampling may produce interpolated values. DN
is also used whenever a band is derived computationally (like dataMask); such bands can be identified by having DN
units and N/A
source format.
For Pleiades bands, DN
are the default and only unit. Reflectance values can be obtained for optical and panchromatic bands using the simple formula: reflectance = DN / 10000
.
The Typical Range
indicates what values are common for a given band and unit, however outliers can be expected.
Band | Physical Quantity (units) | Sentinel Hub Units | Source Format | Typical Range |
---|---|---|---|---|
Optical and panchromatic bands | Scaled reflectance (unitless) | DN | UINT16 | 0 - 4000 Highly reflective pixels can have values above 10000. |
dataMask | N/A | DN | N/A | 0 - no data 1 - data |
Mosaicking
All mosaicking types are supported.