IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - June 2015 - 49

preparatory programs during missions' development,
thematic data and service centres and specific initiatives
as the International Charter "Space and Major Disasters"
and the "Spot World Heritage" program.
A. SCIENTIFIC SUPPORT
Support to Science activities is provided by CNES during all phases of the programs' development. The Science activities range from defining the scientific requirements, optimizing the mission definition, defining the
products and preparing and validating the scientific use
of the mission.
Since the mid nineties CNES has provided heavily subsidized access for science users to high resolution imagery
acquired by the SPOT series of satellites through the ISIS
program. This was extended in the early years of this century to European science users and, following the launch
of the Pleaides constellation, also to Pleiades imagery. This
programme has contributed to a large proportion of the science made possible by the SPOT satellites.
B. APPLICATION DEVELOPMENTSPREPARATORY PROGRAMS
On more applicative missions, actions are carried out all
along the mission development to prepare, accompany and
promote the use and exploitation of the products especially
in the public sector.
A preparatory program was initiated for the Pleiades
mission in 2004 and was closed by a Pleiades Users Thematic Commissioning in April 2014. 130 application studies were conducted by institutional users during this "thematic commissioning" phase. The results were presented
during a specific seminar, the Pléiades Days 2014 [3], with
the objective of raising awareness of public-sector and private users to the capabilities of Pléiades.
With the aim of continuing the support for the development of products and services using Pleiades data, access
to a large database of Pleiades images is to be provided
to private companies for use in the R&D phase of service
development.
A similar approach is foreseen for the SWOT mission, aiming to develop innovative applications for water
resource management in the downstream sector. A specific
workshop [15] was organized in September 2013 on the
contribution of space missions for the development of new
services in this domain.
To go further CNES will participate to a "Booster" initiative in the frame of the Competitivity Poles [16] dynamic
with the objective to foster innovation in the aval sector.
The first "Boosters" should start end of 2015.
C. THEMATIC-EXPLOITATION CENTERS
The French thematic centres propose to the national and
international scientific communities and to the public
policy communities a broad range of products at different
scales, methods and services related to these products. Each
june 2015

ieee Geoscience and remote sensing magazine

Centre relies on a distributed space data infrastructure and
on scientific expertise centres located in different areas.
Four thematic centres are planned focusing on the land
surfaces (Theia[17]), the ocean (former center: Aviso[18]), the
atmosphere (former centers:
Icare [19] and Ether[20]) and
on solid Earth (Form@Ter[21])
CNES haS thE objECtivE
respectively. Inter centre organization and coordination is
to: maiNtaiN itS
being established to deal with
ExpErtiSE iN imagiNg,
the interfaces between the four
altimEtry aNd SouNdiNg
thematic areas.
aNd haS workEd to
These centres will provide
SharE it iN thE
access to Copernicus data
dEvElopmENt of
through the French exploiopEratioNal miSSioNS;
tation platform called PEPS
givE aCCESS to NEw,
(Platform for Exploiting Products from Sentinels), whose
iNNovativE
objective is to facilitate the
mEaSurEmENtS;
access to data from all SentifaCilitatE thE aCCESS to
nel missions for the national
miSSioNS' data aNd
community. PEPS will profoStEr thE dEvElopmENt
pose storage and "hosted
of SErviCES aNd
computing" capability.
appliCatioNS.

D. THE INTERNATIONAL
CHARTER "SPACE AND
MAJOR DISASTERS"
CNES is cofounder and remains an active member of the
International Charter "Space and Major Disasters" [22].
This group of international space agencies aims to provide
a unified system of space data acquisition and delivery to
those affected by natural or man-made disasters. It enables
the rapid mobilisation of satellite observation resources for
more effective crisis management and supplies emergency
organization with services (such as rapid mapping products) to improve their efficiency in the response phase.
The charter has been activated more than 400 times for
100 countries since 2000.
E. THE SPOT WORLD HERITAGE PROGRAM
Over 30 million images have been acquired by the SPOT
family since 1986. This data archive may be considered as
a world heritage, whose access will be facilitated through
the Spot World Heritage program. The objective is to provide free access for non-commercial use to products derived
from the SPOT archive.
The programme is conducted in the framework of a
partnership agreement between CNES and Airbus Defence
and Space through its Geo-Intelligence Division (formerly
known as Spot Image).
The first batch of 200,000 images is currently being processed. The objective is to process at least 100,000 images
per year. The international institutional community can
request processing of other large image batches provided
they cover the processing costs.
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - June 2015