A new commercial earth-imaging satellite, called GeoEye-1, is slated to be launched atop an United Launch Alliance’s Delta II rocket from Vandenberg, California on September 4.
Live coverage on the launch and more information…
Formerly called OrbView-5 it will be the imaging satellite with the hightest resolution commercially available. Only classified military spy satellites achieve higher resolutions. Actually, with a resolution of 41 cm it is necessary to process the images down to 50 cm resolution for a non-restricted access. Only US Government-authorized people can benefit from the maximum resolution.
Credit: GeoEye, www.geoeye.com
Disaster management, infrastructure planning and agriculture optimization are only a few applications that use such satellites. With the very high resolution these can benefit a lot. Just imagine a 4.5 meters long car. It will be imaged with 9 pixels. For example searching for a crashed plane is then much easier and faster.
The upper image shows Colorado Capitol in 1 meter resolution, the lower image in 0.5 m resolution. Copyright: GeoEye, www.geoeye.com
GeoEye-1, built by General Dynamics and weighing nearly 2 metric tonnes, will orbit the Earth 15 times a day in an altitude of about 700 kilometers. It has an one terabit large recorder and can transfer data with impressive 740 Mbit/second.
Publically available for everyone is the Landsat imagery, used for example in NASA’s World Wind. That satellite, launched in 1999, has a resolution of only 15 meters. It won’t take that long until companies like Google will start to use such high resolution imagery then provided by GeoEye-1. Aerial pictures of your house were yesterday, it’s time for satellite imagery to hang on the wall.
But of course, coming with such high resolution, is the question regarding privacy. A half meter is not good enough to identify individuals. But nonetheless discussion will be necessary as the next even better spies in the skies loom ahead.
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