Dozens of new imagery satellites are scheduled to be placed into orbit throughout the next several years. With a wide array of capabilities, resolutions and owners, these spacecraft could spur a major expansion of the imagery market.
While U.S. companies continue to hold the edge in operating the highest-resolution satellites, nations throughout the globe are stepping up their efforts in other areas of the satellite imagery market.

“The Indians have a very impressive array of satellites,” says Ed Jurkevics, founder and principal of Chesapeake Analytics of Arlington, Va. “The Russians have a bewildering number from competing agencies. Other important ones are coming from South Korea, Taiwan, Germany and France.”

Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. of Guildford, England, has helped bring satellite imagery to even more countries with the advent of the Disaster Monitoring Constellation, a collection of small imagery satellite that provide daily collection of data for applications including global disaster monitoring. Under the cooperative venture, the United Kingdom, Algeria, China, Turkey and Nigeria each own satellites that carry an imaging payload that can collect images with a ground resolution of 32 meters. Turkey’s Bilsat-1 also carries an imager that can produce black-and-white images with 12-meter resolution and color images with 24-meter resolution, while China’s Beijing-1 adds a camera that collects 4-meter imagery. The data collected by each of the spacecraft is used for national needs as well as shared among the members of the venture.

“This is the first time satellites are shared by different countries,” says Chris Chant, a director for Surrey. “Each satellite owner is also the owner of all of the data from all of them. It’s a great thing, for any point on Earth can be viewed at any time of day, and it can be done quickly.”

The success of the Disaster Monitoring Constellation is spurring more demand for Surrey’s small imagery satellites, and future generations will have even better capabilities on the same size platform. DMC International Imaging Ltd., a commercial entity formed to help market imagery collected by the satellites, will add an imagery satellite to the Disaster Monitoring Constellation in 2008. UK DMC-2 will provide imagery with a resolution of 22 meters and be placed into orbit along with Deimos-1, being built for Spain’s Deimos Imaging SL. In November, Surrey signed a contract with the National Space Research and Development Agency of Nigeria to develop a high-resolution satellite. The Nigeriasat-2 satellite will collect imagery with a resolution of 2 meters, says Chant.

U.S. Still Leads Way

While other countries are making strides, a pair of U.S. firms — GeoEye Inc. and DigitalGlobe — remain in the forefront of high-resolution satellite imagery. DigitalGlobe, based in Longmont, Colo., operates the Quickbird satellite, which collects imagery with a resolution of 0.6 meters. GeoEye, located in Dulles, Va., and created when OrbImage purchased rival Space Imaging, operates a pair of imaging spacecraft that can collect images with a resolution of 1 meter. Ikonos was placed into orbit in 1999, and OrbView-3 has been in operation since 2003. However, GeoEye said in March that OrbView-3 has suffered what is most likely a fatal camera malfunction.

The companies got their start in the late l990s, but their real boost came when the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) committed to buying large amount of imagery from the companies under the ClearView program launched in 2000. The commercial imagery, which is used for mapping purposes, has become so critical for the government that the NGA is helping to fund the development of the next generation of imagery spacecraft under the NextView program.

GeoEye plans to launch its GeoEye-1 satellite before the end of the year. The spacecraft “will be the world’s highest resolution commercial Earth imaging satellite,” says Mark Brender, the company’s vice president of communications and marketing “It will have a ground resolution of 0.41 meters, or about 16 inches. From a 425-mile-high orbit, GeoEye-1 will be able to discern an item the size of home plate on a baseball diamond. More importantly, it will be able to map the location of objects on the Earth’s surface to within 3 meters of their true location on the globe, and it will be able to produce multispectral color imaging at this high resolution.”

DigitalGlobe plans to launch a pair of next-generation systems, says company spokesman Chuck Herring. WorldView 1 and WorldView 2, which will collect imagery with 0.5-meter resolution, are scheduled to be launched in mid-2007 and late 2008, respectively. A key significance of this new generation of satellites “is that right now there is a scarcity of capacity, especially in terms of world events such as what is taking place in the Middle East,” says Herring. “The U.S., Europe and other countries don’t have complete systems.”

Developing this new generation of imagery satellites represents only a slight increase in resolution. “The big change is that both WorldViews will have five times the collection capacity of QuickBird,” he says. “This means a 10 times increase in our capacity. This will allow us to address the completeness of our coverage. For this is very important to our customers. Now we will be able to collect data from regions our customers now don’t have ready access to.” DigitalGlobe holds a license that would allow them to place a camera into orbit that could collect imagery with a resolution of 0.25 meters, but with strict rules surrounding the use of the data and lack of commercial demand it would not be worth the investment at this time, says Herring.

Along with the capacity improvement, the new satellites should also help spark greater awareness of the possibilities of spacial content, says Herring. “We’re finding that industries that were not that interested in satellite imaging, such as real estate and insurance, are now becoming very interested,” he says. “We’re also seeing a growth in Internet mapping. Satellite customers who didn’t have a completeness of areas covered are now finding it. Also, we’re finding that many of the images now in use are two to five years old. People want updated imagery, and this is for governments and commercial entities that already have a start in this area. It doesn’t include developing countries that don’t even have a base map. Within a couple of years most all these needs will be met.”

The more capacity and the more coverage available, the more others will be spurred to use satellite imagery and fine new uses for the data. One application which is showing up with a new twist is GPS technology. “A few years back people just saw line information on a black background,” Herring says. “Now people want to see natural landmarks like lakes or hills as well images like hotels on these handheld base maps. There are many more applications in which imagery is now showing up where traditionally it did not. It’s all part of a general trend.”

GeoEye’s Brender makes some complimentary points. “Industries will be making more and more business decisions based upon their increased access to satellite imaging,” he says. “Anything that needs to be mapped, measured or monitored can be efficiently done with space-based imagery.”

Since this imagery also is more accessible to governments, they will be using it more, for everything from national security intelligence to humanitarian relief to land management to mapping, says Brender. Various governmental departments will find their own special uses. For example, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, part of the U.S. Department of Interior, is using data for asset management of Indian lands. “Some markets require a higher resolution than was previously easily available from satellites, such as state and local governments for zoning, planning, mapping and asset management,” Brender says.

Some Challenges Remain

Mick Garrett, chief technical officer of value-added reseller i-cubed of Fort Collins, Colo., sees the positives touted by the satellite operators. “The total amount of data these satellites will provide for our customers over the next three to five years is significant,” he says. “On one hand, vast amounts of visual data will be used to understand the physical processes involved in global warming. On the other, there is an increasing amount of focus on high resolution for business consumers.”

The biggest opportunity for a company such as i-cubed, Garrett says, “is there is both lots more data and a much more rapid turnaround. But the management of the data and making sense of it is important as well. This is all tantalizingly to the good,” he says.
But Garret sees significant challenges as well. “Every time you halve the resolution, you quadruple the amount of data that has to be stored,” he says. “You are now dealing with five to 10 times the amount of data. On a terrabyte you can store a lot of data. A disc drive that will hold about a terrabyte will be coming out later this year. But if you want a full resolution of all of the United States at 1 meter you are talking about 40 to 50 terrabytes. When you start dealing with that amount of data — pushing that much around on networks for processing — it all becomes very problematic. The industry is crying out for a quantum leap in storage technology to house all this data.”

While Garrett sees the need for significant advancements in storage technology, “I have tremendous faith in technology being able to meet this challenge. We already process a tremendous amount of imagery every year, and we believe we will be able to continue to exploit the amount of imagery coming at us,” he says. “There are very interesting developments on the horizon. The entire paradigm of satellite imaging is changing.”