The first satellite of the Pleiades family has been launched the 17th of December, 2011. The in orbit commissioning phase has lasted around two months, during which, the Pleiades system has been progressively opened to users while verifying that it worked in accordance with expected performances. Then the system has been delivered to users for an operational exploitation form the 1st of March, 2012. Pleiades satellites have a huge agility, offering new acquisition capabilities in comparison with the SPOT family, such as: instantaneous stereo images, under different stereoscopic conditions (up to 300 km × 20 km or 150 km × 40 km) and mosaic images, obtained from along the track enlarging of the field of view (up to 120 km × 120 km). Pleiades is a dual system: this means that it is intended to fulfill an extended panel of both civilian (including institutional needs) and defense users' needs. It has led us to include resource sharing protocols in the satellite mission planning function. In addition, we have improved the average system reactivity, preserving a high acquisition capability, by increasing the number of mission planning activations per day (in an automatic way) and by a new function, named Direct Tasking which allows the improvement of the reactivity locally but also the reduction of the age of the information. First of all, the article will remind the main mission characteristics of the satellites and the system, and describe the satellite mission planning function. Then it will present the first results of the operational programming, showing in particular, during the in orbit commissioning phase, the way we have followed tuning this function and associated parameters in order to get the biggest operational capability possible, respecting the satellite programming constraints such as: power budget, instrument use duration, etc.
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