Satellite Image News

A New View in 2009: DigitalGlobe Announces Launch of New Satellite

Monique Romeijn — Sun, 04 May 2008 21:33:44 +0000

The launch partner for DigitalGlobe’s much-anticipated WorldView-2 satellite has finally been announced. The first satellite to detect four additional bands of color, this newest earth-orbiter will soon be producing some of the most accurate satellite images available. Engineers in oil and gas, environmental protection, construction, and city planning will find these images invaluable to planning cost-efficient construction and research projects.

DigitalGlobe has announced plans to launch its third commercial imaging satellite in mid-2009. The company, which supplies high-resolution satellite images to hundreds of government and commercial clients including Google Earth, has selected Boeing Launch Services for the launch of WorldView-2. The launch will be the third partnership between DigitalGlobe and Boeing Launch Services – Boeing successfully launched DigitalGlobe’s previous satellites, QuickBird and WorldView-1, which launched in September 2007.

Image Credit: DigitalGlobe

Satellite imaging has uses in hundreds of industries including agriculture, coastal management, environmental studies, defense mapping, urban planning, homeland security, and disaster relief. The technology has also found mass appeal in online applications like Google Earth, Google Maps and MSN Live Search Maps, which offer users satellite images of locations around the globe.

The WorldView-2, which costs around $400 million, is the only satellite of its kind to be built without any government funding.

WorldView-2 will offer several improvements on its predecessor’s image capture and storage capabilities and help companies keep up with the increasing demand for high-resolution satellite images. The new satellite will fly at an altitude of 800 km and produce the highest-resolution pictures yet, capturing images with a resolution of 0.46 meters at Nadir (note that imagery must be resampled to 0.5 meters for non-US Government customers). The satellite will also feature improved communications: Images can be downloaded directly to clients, significantly decreasing the time customers normally wait to receive requested images.

Additionally, WorldView-2 will introduce four new bands of color: coastal, red edge, yellow, and near-infrared-2. The improved detail and image qualities of WorldView-2 will allow for increased spectral analysis to improve Geospatial accuracy in GIS, mapping and other environmental applications. Satellite imaging companies across the country will benefit from the higher quality of data collected by the new satellite.

“The greatest advantage of the WorldView-2 is the additional bands,” said Leopold J. Romeijn of Houston-based Satellite Imaging Corporation. “Using this satellite, you’ll detect more information from the surface of the earth.”

Previous high-resolution satellite images were only available in panchromatic and four standard colors: red, green, blue (RGB) and near-infrared (NIR). The addition of WorldView-2’s four new colors will provide a wealth of information for vegetation cover to deliver detailed landcover classifications and support agriculture and forestry management. Romeijn said that the WorldView-2 will be especially helpful to federal agencies and private companies in need of good environmental data.

“If you’re looking at a forest or agriculture crops, the additional bands can help you far better analyze the health and vigor of the crops and forest vegetation. That’s a big advantage – the WorldView-2 is going to be a good system to work with,” Romeijn said.

Satellite Imaging Corporation is one of many companies that processes and interprets images gathered from DigitalGlobe’s satellites. The processed images help in the planning and design of pipelines, roads, mapping, and other projects. For more information about the WorldView-2 or imaging solutions from Satellite Imaging Corporation, please call (1) 832-237-2900 or visit www.satimagingcorp.com.

DigitalGlobe Anticipates Launch of WorldView-2 Satellite Late in 2008

Monique Romeijn — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:37:20 +0000

DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-2 is anticipated to launch in late 2008, pending finalization of customer contracts. WorldView-1 was launched in September 2007 and has been providing the highest resolution images ever captured by a commercial imaging system.

The WorldView-2 sensor will provide a high resolution Panchromatic band and eight (8) Multispectral bands; four (4) standard colors (red, green, blue, and near-infrared 1) and four (4) new bands (coastal, yellow, red edge, and near-infrared 2), full-color images for enhanced spectral analysis, mapping and monitoring applications, land-use planning, disaster relief, exploration, defense and intelligence, and visualization and simulation environments.

To View WORLDVIEW-2 SATELLITE SENSOR CHARACTERISTICS Click Here

The WorldView-2 imaging payload is the second such system engineered and manufactured by ITT Space Systems Division for DigitalGlobe. Once deployed, operating at an altitude of 800 kilometers, the advanced imaging system to date will take pan-sharpened, multispectral images of the earth with better than 0.5-meter resolution from almost 500 miles above the Earth and will supply unprecedented detail and geospatial accuracy, further expanding the applications for satellite imagery in both commercial and government markets. Added spectral diversity will provide the ability to perform precise change detection and mapping.

The WorldView-2 telescope will have a 110-cm aperture and fly at a higher altitude of 770 km. It will provide the same panchromatic half-meter resolution imagery as WorldView I, in addition to 1.8-meter multispectral resolution imagery.

Worldview-2 will also have the ability for direct tasking, which will allow select customers around the world to load imaging profiles directly up to the spacecraft and execute delivery of the data directly down to their own ground stations.

WorldView-1 Update:

New Results for WorldView-1 at <2-meter Geospatial position accuracy with no ground control points!

PCI Geomatics has demonstrated by utilizing the PCI OrthoEngine module that the WorldView-1 satellite sensor can provide geospatial position accuracies of <2m without the use of GCP’s, saving you time and money. In fact, by adding 1 or more GCPs to a single scene or strip, expect accuracies of well under 1m RMSE.

What does this mean?

Obtain highly accurate results, even in areas where you don’t have much ground reference data

Create large mosaics without GCPs for anywhere in the world and still obtain high-accuracy reference images

Update your satellite base maps, including images in Google Earth or Yahoo Maps

Our unique Pan Sharpening techniques adds even more to the value, allowing WorldView-1 data to be merged with high-resolution color imagery (from QuickBird, IKONOS, SPOT5, Aerial Photography and more) for high resolution color scenes.

DigitalGlobe currently operates the QuickBird satellite, which can collect black-and-white, or panchromatic, images with 0.61-meter resolution at Nadir. The satellite, launched in October 2001, also collects multispectral images with 2.5 meter resolution. It is expected to operate until 2009. WorldView-1 high-capacity, panchromatic imaging system features half-meter resolution imagery. Operating at an altitude of 496 kilometers, WorldView-1 has an average revisit time of 1.7 days and is capable of collecting up to 750,000 square kilometers (290,000 square miles) per day of half-meter imagery. The satellite also is equipped with state-of-the-art geo-location accuracy of <2m without GCP’s while with one (1) or two (2) GCP’s the geospatial position accuracy is <1m and further exhibits stunning agility with rapid targeting and efficient in-track stereo collection.

For more information on our products and services please contact us.

Satellite Image of Great Lakes of Africa

Monique Romeijn — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 19:51:02 +0000

This Envisat satellite image highlights portions of three of the lakes located in the Western Rift of the Great Rift Valley, a geological fault system of Southwest Asia and East Africa. The series of lakes in and around the Great Rift Valley are referred to as the Great Lakes of Africa.

Envisat’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) instrument acquired this image on 24 September 2007 while working in Wide Swath Mode (WSM) to provide a spatial resolution of 150 meters.

ENVISAT Satellite Image - Great Rift Valley

Image Credit : ESA (European Space Agency)

Lake Edward (top) straddles the border of DRC and Uganda (upper right). It is 77-km long, 40-km wide and covers a total surface area of some 2300 sq km, making it the smallest of the Great Lakes of Africa. Lake Kivu (middle) borders of DRC and Rwanda (right), covers a total surface area of some 2700 sq km, stands roughly 1460 m above sea level and is 480 m deep. The pronounced depth of the lake is a result of the rift valley slowly pulling apart, causing volcanic activity. At 676-km long, Lake Tanganyika (bottom) is the world’s longest freshwater lake, nearly the entire western part of the lake is in DRC.

Volcanoes National Park (in northwestern Rwanda) and the Virunga National Park (in DRC) are located between Lakes Edward and Kivu. In addition to being home to five of the eight volcanoes (visible above Lake Kivu) of the Virunga Mountains, Volcanoes National Park is the home of the largest wild population of mountain gorillas.

To view 3D Fly Through of Visoke Volcano in Virunga National park click here.

To view 3D Satellite Image of Visoke Volcano, Volcanoes National Park click here.

To read our article on Satellite Remote Sensing Technology and GIS for Wildlife Conservation click here.

About the ENVISAT Satellite

European Space Agency launched Envisat in March 2002, the largest Earth Observation spacecraft ever built. It carries ten sophisticated optical and radar instruments to provide continuous observation and monitoring of the Earth’s land, atmosphere, oceans and ice caps. Envisat data collectively provide a wealth of information on the workings of the Earth system, including insights into factors contributing to climate change.

Image Credit: ESA

With an ambitious and innovative payload, Envisat data supports earth science research and allows monitoring of the evolution of environmental and climatic changes as well as facilitate the development of operational and commercial applications.

Its largest single instrument is the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR), operating at C-band, ensures continuity of data after ERS-2. It features enhanced capability in terms of coverage, range of incidence angles, polarization, and modes of operation. The improvements allow radar beam elevation steerage and the selection of different swaths, 100 or 400km wide.

The Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) is a imaging spectrometer that measures the solar radiation reflected by the Earth, at a ground spatial resolution of 300m, with 15 spectral bands in visible and near infra-red and programmable in width and position. MERIS allows global coverage of the Earth every 3 days.

The primary mission of MERIS is the measurement of sea color in oceans and coastal areas. Knowledge of sea color can be converted into a measurement of chlorophyll pigment concentration, suspended sediment concentration and aerosol loads over marine areas. It is also used for land and atmospheric monitoring.

Envisat Overview

Live Envisat

Where is Envisat