In spring 2007, GeoEye (www.geoeye.com)—the
U.S. company formed when ORBIMAGE purchased the assets of Space
Imaging—will launch GeoEye-1, taking commercial Earth imaging to new
horizons. The satellite will acquire high-quality panchromatic and
multispectral imagery at unrivaled spatial resolutions of 0.41 meters
and 1.65 meters, respectively, and collect hundreds of thousands of
square kilometers of map-accurate imagery in a single day.
GeoEye President and CEO Matthew O’Connell, who brought 20 years of Wall
Street savvy to then ORBIMAGE in 2001, fully understands the critical
role GeoEye-1 will play in the commercial remote sensing industry. To
ensure its success, he assembled what he calls a “best-of-breed” team to
develop and launch the satellite.
Gilbert, Ariz.-based General Dynamics C4 Systems (www.gdc4s.com) is the
prime contractor and integrator for the satellite’s bus and telescope.
GeoEye-1 will be much larger than IKONOS, the world’s first
high-resolution commercial imaging satellite launched in 1999 by Space
Imaging. The IKONOS satellite weighs 1,600 pounds, but GeoEye-1 will tip
the scales at more than 4,000 pounds, collecting imagery as it moves
around Earth at about 17,000 miles per hour. To develop a camera capable
of acquiring imagery at 41-centimeter spatial resolution (or about 16
inches), GeoEye turned to ITT (www.ssd.itt.com),
formerly Kodak Remote Sensing Systems, which also built the IKONOS
sensor. The satellite will be carried into orbit on a Boeing Delta-II
rocket (www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/delta),
the most reliable launch vehicle in its class. This team of contractors
has virtually a 100 percent mission success record. MacDonald, Dettwiler
and Associates (www.mdacorporation.com)
and Orbit Logic (www.orbitlogic.com)
are upgrading elements of the ground segment.
“Mission success is our only option,” says O’Connell, “and we have put
together the team that can accomplish it.”
Advanced Capabilities for All Users
Following the launch of GeoEye-1 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.,
the satellite will undergo approximately 45 days of calibration and
checkout. Once the satellite is declared operational, it will commence a
three-month imaging operation dedicated almost exclusively to meeting
the needs of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). For the
most part, imagery collected during this period will be made available
in the company archive for commercial sale. GeoEye will be taking
commercial orders during this timeframe and fulfilling them as soon as
possible. The company will be ready to employ GeoEye-1 for full
commercial operations by fall 2007.
“The GeoEye-1 satellite fundamentally will be a mapping machine in
orbit,” explains Mark Brender, GeoEye’s vice president of Communications
and Marketing. “And because of its mission, NGA is the most experienced
agency on the planet for all things geospatial. Although NGA is our most
important customer, we will focus intensely on commercial customers
around the world.”
As a major customer, NGA will receive priority
tasking and a large discount for agreeing to purchase a large volume of
imagery. But there will still be a large amount of capacity dedicated to
commercial customers and for the company to build a vast archive of
imagery in a relatively short period of time.
“Spatial resolution, geolocation accuracy and large-area coverage are
the three specifications that commercial and government customers are
most interested in,” says Dave Kenyon, GeoEye senior director, NextView
Space and Launch Segment. “And those are the key capabilities we focused
on when building this satellite.”
Of course, resolution is the parameter by which most experts judge and
compare imaging satellites. The satellite is in a class by itself,
according to Frank Koester, vice president and director, Commercial and
Space Science Program, ITT Space Systems Division.
Says Koester, “ITT’s integrated camera payload, including telescope and
sensor subsystem, will provide GeoEye-1 with the highest resolution in
commercial remote sensing.”
Offering 41-centimeter panchromatic and 1.65-meter multispectral in the
blue, green, red and near-infrared bands, the satellite will enable
clients to identify and differentiate small objects and features at a
level of detail never available before from commercial imaging
satellites. At that resolution, one would be able to count the manholes
on a city street or discern home plate on a baseball diamond. Geospatial
data users in the urban planning, utility and cartographic
disciplines-—all of which traditionally map small features—are expected
to expand their use of satellite imagery as a result.
It’s anticipated that online search engines such
as Yahoo!, Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth also would be
anxious to import consistent color imagery over large areas. In
addition, although satellite and aerial images often are complementary,
GeoEye expects many traditional users of aerial imagery to make the jump
to satellites for applications requiring half-meter resolution,
especially in parts of the world where it’s difficult to deploy an
aircraft due to weather, political or security issues.
But there’s more to good imagery than just spatial resolution, noted Lee
Demitry, GeoEye’s vice president of Satellite Engineering and
Operations. “People are going to be stunned with the sharpness and
clarity of this imagery,” he predicts, explaining that overall image
quality, most often defined by the sharpness of feature boundaries, is
just as critical as spatial resolution to many applications. The camera
builder, ITT, has employed every available technological advancement to
achieve unparalleled image quality.
“The large size of the telescope’s primary mirror, the alignment of the
camera telescope and a favorable (high) signal-to-noise ratio are key
design elements in ultimately producing high-quality imagery, and they
have received extraordinary attention since the first design meetings,”
says Demitry.
Geolocation accuracy is another imaging capability that GeoEye expects
will draw raves from end users across all market segments. Geolocation
accuracy refers to the precision with which objects in an image can be
mapped relative to their absolute location on Earth’s surface. GeoEye-1
will offer three-meter accuracy, which means end users can map natural
and man-made features in stereo to within three meters of their actual
locations without ground control points.
This level of geolocation accuracy will be
achieved with the help of three onboard systems: a Global
Positioning System (GPS) receiver, gyroscope and star tracker, which
will enable the satellite to determine its precise attitude,
position and location at all times. These data, referred to as
ancillary data, will be transmitted along with image data back to
Earth for the ground segment to use in processing the imagery to a
higher degree of geolocation precision than would otherwise be
possible. Some of these systems, such as the star tracker, have
never flown on commercial satellites before and were formerly only
used on U.S. government imaging satellites.
Adds Demitry, “The ability to map features with this level of
horizontal accuracy without any ground control is unprecedented for
commercial satellites and will be a huge advantage-—and enormous
cost savings—for any cartographic application.”
The third major technological advancement found in the GeoEye-1
satellite will be its ability to collect an enormous amount of
imagery. In the panchromatic mode the satellite will be capable of
collecting up to 700,000 square kilometers in a single day, and in
the multispectral mode 350,000 square kilometers per day. This
staggering volume of data collection—more than four times that of
any other existing commercial imaging platform—will be made possible
by the agility of the satellite itself.
“The entire satellite will be able to turn and swivel very quickly
in orbit to point the camera telescope at areas of the Earth
directly below it, as well as from side to side and front to back,”
explains GeoEye’s Kenyon. “This agility will enable it to collect
much more imagery during a single pass.”
According to Mike Greenwood, spokesperson for General Dynamics C4
Systems, which is building the GeoEye-1 satellite on a
mission-proven bus design, the agility is made possible by “enhanced
reaction wheels that provide the torque required for motion, yet
inject little jitter or smear into the imagery.”
The standard image swath width will be 15.2 kilometers, but GeoEye-1
will be able to swivel and collect multiple adjoining swaths on a
single pass, meaning that large contiguous areas can be imaged at
one time. This is ideal for large-scale mapping requirements,
especially in terms of emergency response and disaster relief. The
extreme agility also means that GeoEye can satisfy more than one
client during a single pass by collecting a variety of individual
scenes in the same geographic region. The satellite will swivel up
to 40 degrees off nadir, giving it an effective revisit rate of less
than three days.
GeoEye already has announced plans to put the large-area imaging
capability to work in filling its archive. The company says it will
collect as much land imagery as possible on every pass and store it
in the archive whether there is a tasking order for the scenes or
not.
Positive Reaction from User Communities
Announcement of GeoEye-1’s imaging specifications has elicited
enthusiastic responses from both the commercial and private-sector
imagery markets. Ed Jurkevics, a remote sensing industry consultant
and principal analyst at Chesapeake Analytics in Arlington, Va.,
predicts the large-area imaging will ultimately be the capability
that expands the client base for GeoEye-1.
“From a financial point of view, it’s noteworthy that GeoEye-1 is
fully funded,” notes Jurkevics. “And from a technical point of view,
GeoEye-1 will be able to deliver imagery over large areas in a
relatively short and reasonable period of time. So clients can
expect to receive a complete image map over a large area—such as a
country—in one season rather than over many months.”
He explained that for large-area mapping
projects, fast acquisition improves the overall success of many
applications. If too much time elapses between collections of
contiguous scenes, for example, changes in ground condition such as
vegetative growth or soil moisture can adversely impact correlations
made among the scenes. The accuracy of digital elevation model
extraction from image pairs can be degraded if the image pairs were
collected at different times under different conditions.
For government applications, especially those involving the defense
and intelligence communities, the large-area coverage combined with
the 41-centimeter spatial resolution has spurred the greatest
anticipation for the new satellite, according to Jim Lewis, director
of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.
According to Lewis, GeoEye-1 will help take some pressure off U.S.
Department of Defense satellites because it will be able to provide
the data for many of their applications, thanks in part to the fact
that its spatial resolution and coverage area may be approaching the
same capabilities as classified imaging systems.
“[In the defense/intelligence community], you have competition for
assets so they have to prioritize which mission comes first,” he
explains. “Being able to go outside of those government assets and
get a commercial system that can provide you things on a much faster
basis can only help. And the government rides on the investment made
by Wall Street in commercial remote sensing so the cost to the
taxpayer is less.”
Lewis added that commercial imaging systems received tremendous
support from the U.S. Department of Defense because their images
aren’t classified. Although this may sound counter-intuitive,
military agencies often favor unclassified information, including
satellite imagery, because they can be shared more freely with
allies and coalition partners or nongovernment organizations.
Security concerns aren’t an issue with commercial satellite imagery.
NGA reiterated the need for commercial imagery in general and
GeoEye-1 imagery in particular in an official statement from Douglas
McGovern, NGA’s chief of its Commercial Solutions Division.
“The improved capabilities being fielded in the GeoEye-1 satellite
and ground segments are projected to provide greater coverage,
higher resolution and faster imagery delivery,” states McGovern.
“These improvements should help to satisfy the growing demand for
unclassified imagery across the defense and intelligence
communities.”
In October 2006, GeoEye announced that former
NGA Director James Clapper joined the company’s Board of Directors.
He joins another recent addition to the GeoEye board, Martin Faga,
former CEO of Mitre and former director of the National Reconn
aissance Office.
While GeoEye-1 will be able to collect imagery with a resolution of
41 centimeters, under the company’s current operating license from
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the
imagery must be re-sampled to 50 centimeters or half a meter for
commercial customers. However, company officials said they plan to
ask for a modification to this licensing constraint to offer
customers their best available product and more effectively compete
with providers outside the United States.
Improving the Customer Experience
The satellite segment of the GeoEye-1 program has successfully
completed many of its major milestones and is on track for a spring
2007 launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. In
anticipation of the launch, teams of GeoEye engineers and
technicians have been focused on building a state-of-the-art ground
segment to operate the satellite and quickly deliver imagery-based
products to customers worldwide.
Under the development expertise of GeoEye and its key suppliers, the
company is upgrading a centralized command and control facility at
its headquarters in Dulles, Va., near Washington, D.C. This
operations center will send tasking and operating commands to the
satellite and receive data downlinks from it. Three other stations
will be operated or leased by GeoEye in Alaska, Norway and
Antarctica. A total of four stations are needed to handle primary
data reception due to the large volume of data that will be captured
by the satellite.
International customers will be pleased to learn that GeoEye will
continue to support a network of receiving stations owned and
operated by local business partners, referred to as Regional
Affiliates and Regional Distributors. Although details of the GeoEye
downlink agreements aren’t finalized, the company expects many
existing IKONOS and OrbView-3 stations will make the software
upgrade needed to receive GeoEye-1 data.
“Our international strategic partners will get the first offers to
upgrade current ground stations to receive GeoEye-1 imagery,” says
Paolo Colombi, vice president of GeoEye’s international business
unit. “Because many of these ground stations sell imagery to
national governments, it’s expected they will want to provide their
customers with the highest resolution and most accurate data. And
multispectral imagery is important to our international customers.
Such imagery won’t be offered by many of our competitors’
next-generation systems.”
Regardless of location, GeoEye-1 customers will be able to order a
variety of imagery products directly from GeoEye. The company plans
to enhance its existing Carterra Online system to allow clients to
perform online searches of the GeoEye-1, IKONOS and OrbView-3
archives. In the near future, users will have a greater ability to
directly order and receive products online.
“We understand that geospatial information consumers want imagery
that is current, and as a result, we are putting a great deal of
emphasis on rapid product turnaround,” explains Alex Fox, GeoEye
vice president of Products and Solutions. “We expect to be able to
deliver our smallest image product to a client shortly after
collection by the satellite. Our customers won’t need to figure out
which satellite they want to acquire their imagery; they just need
to tell us what their project specifications are, and we will
determine which satellite to use in fulfilling it.”
Summarizes O’Connell, “With the launch of GeoEye-1 from Vandenberg
Air Force Base, we can assure our customers that they will have
access to high-quality commercial satellite imagery well into the
next decade.”
