Last month we were in Europe with a look at the location of a competition for injured servicemen and women, and for the May edition of the Pléiades 1 – Pléiades Neo Stadium of the Monthwe head back to the United States with a look at the location of a late May Major League Baseball (MLB) series at T-Mobile Park in Seattle, Washington.

A quick update here for our readers on the 30-cm Pléiades Neo constellation! As of now, plans are on track for Pléiades Neo 5 and 6 to launch in September with expected commercialization of the data by the end of 2022. When fully operational, the 30-cm Pléiades Neo constellation will collect some 2 million square kilometers of imagery per day with the ability to image locations twice per day.

A 30-cm color image of T-Mobile Park in Seattle, Washington, USA collected on October 30, 2021 by Pléiades Neo 3; and then a 50-cm Pléiades 1A image of the same stadium collected on June 20, 2021. These images have custom processing and color balancing applied by Apollo Mapping.PLÉIADES © CNES 2022.

About the Stadium: Located about 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) south of downtown Seattle, Washington in the city’s SoDo neighborhood, T-Mobile Park sits on a plot of land in close proximity to the Puget Sound. The vision for T-Mobile Park started on March 30, 1994 when King County Executive Gary Locke created a 28-member council who reviewed the need for a new baseball stadium for the home team, the Seattle Mariners. By October 1995, the council and state legislature had approved funding and plans for the new stadium, picking NBBJ as the project architect. The $517 million ballpark sold its naming rights to T-Mobile in 2018 for $87.5 million over 25-years. With some 47,943 seats for fans, T-Mobile Park features a natural grass field made up of a blend of four Kentucky bluegrass and two perennial rye varieties.

Fun Factoids: (1) T-Mobile Park is the site of an early season MLB series between the Houston Astros and Seattle Mariners on May 27th to May 29th. This series is rematch of the first and second places teams in 2021 for the American League West division whereby Seattle just missed the playoffs after they were eliminated on the last day of the season by the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. (2) In 2020, the Seattle Mariners announced a 10-year, $280 million plan to improve T-Mobile Park, partly for the 2023 All-Star Game scheduled for the stadium and partially just for on-going maintenance. The improvement plans include replacing the sound system, expanded bars and restaurant spaces and improved entry points. (3) T-Mobile Park features a retractable roof designed to keep rain off the field but also to maintain an open-air playing environment. The 9-acre roof weighs some 22 million pound, contains enough steel to build a 55-story skyscraper and can open/close in under 20 minutes.

The 50-cm Pléiades 1 High-Resolution Satellite Constellation

The Pléiades 1 constellation (or at least part of it!) has been in orbit since December 2011 and if you have not had a chance to check out any sample imagery, take a few moments and have a look at the gallery on our website. If you work with high-resolution imagery, you should consider Pléiades 1 and Pléiades Neo for your next geospatial projects.

A variety of Pléiades 1 products are available from both a well-established archive and as a new collection, including 50-centimeter (cm) pansharpened imagery and 50-cm panchromatic – 2-meter (m) 4-band multispectral bundles. We are happy to discuss the technical specifications, pricing and tasking options available with both of these satellite constellations.

The 30-cm Pléiades Neo High-Resolution Satellite Constellation

Pléiades Neo is our newest high-resolution satellite constellation. The first Neo satellite went up in April 2021 and the second in August of the same year. This 30-centimeter resolution constellation will add two more satellites in the next few years and upgrade from daily to intraday revisits. Pléiades Neo has six multispectral bands with 1.2-meter resolution, including a deep blue and two infrared bands, along with a 30-centimeter resolution panchromatic band. 

The archive is growing every day, and the satellites are available for new collections, making Pléiades Neo the perfect solution for site monitoring. Check out our beautiful sample images in the Pléiades Neo gallery.

More sample images and technical information about Pléiades 1 can be found on our website here; while the same can be found here for the Pléiades Neo constellation.

The Apollo Mapping sales team can answer any questions you might have about Pléiades 1 and/or Pléiades Neo. We can be reached at (303) 993-3863 or sales@apollomapping.com.