Here we present the operational, fully automatic processing system CATENA developed at DLR. The uniform pre-processing of an increasing amount of satellite data for generation of whole coverages of e.g. Europe for one time or of time-series for one location covering many years is requested more and more. Such requirements contain the processing of huge amounts of data which can hardly be handled manually. So a fully automatic pre-processing environment was developed at the Remote Sensing Technology Institute of DLR in Oberpfaffenhofen since 2006. This processing environment named CATENA was designed for uniform, automatic general purpose processing of huge amounts of optical satellite data of similar type.<br><br> In this paper we present the concept of the processing system, the framework and the decomposition of processing requirements to processing modules and processing chains. We give some examples for already implemented general purpose or project specific processing chains and an analysis of performance and quality of the results.