Impact Of New Satellites
While the Internet provides great hope for the long-term future of the commercial imagery industry, the companies also expect a boost in the short term from the upcoming launches of several next-generation.
Digitalglobe will be the first to bring a satellite capable of providing commercial imagery of a half-meter or better, with the company's Worldview satellite scheduled to be launched by the end of this year. While the resolution provided by Worldview iwill not be that much greater than the company's Quickbird satellite, which collects imagery with a resolution of 0.62 meters, the real differentiator will be in the amount of collection capacity that Worldview will provide Digitalglobe, about four times greater than that offered by Quickbrid, says Herring. "The onboard storage and communication downlink capability will be greater, and the satellite will have much more agility, meaning we can pick up targets more quickly."
Geoeye, already operating a pair of high-resolution satellites, plans to launch its next-generation spacecraft, Geoeye-1, in February 2007. The satellite will capture imagery with a resolution of 0.41 meters and be able to collect three times the amount of data provided by Ikonos and Orbview-3 combined, says Wilt. "Some of the benefits are obvious," he says. "With the accuracy of the pixels, it opens up more uses for the imagery. Twice the accuracy is going to open the marketplace. We have to explore how, but we hope the offer is compelling."
Geoeye also believes that the increase in capacity and decrease in revisit time will provide one of the biggest improvements in its service to commercial and government customers. "The combination of two satellites has been interesting to use and interesting to some of the customers," Wilt says. "In collecting pixels that don't have a temporal requirement behind them, it's not as profound, but where you're trying to sort through what is on the ground today and what is happening, as with Hurricane Katrina, it provides twice the opportunity to collect information. In theory, we will be able to collect any given target at half the time it would have required."
Canada's Macdonald Dettwiler and associates, which operates the Radarsat-1 imagery satellite, also is gearing up to launch its next-generation Radarsat-2 spacecraft. While Radarsat-1 was built primarily for the use of the Canadian government, which uses the data for purposes such as monitoring ice movement and illegal shipping activity, Macdonald Dettwiler has built a significant commercial business based on the radar imagery. "One of our biggest challenges, as opposed to optical imagery satellites, is that we've had to put quite a bit of effort into educating people on what the data can do."
The launch of Radarsat-2, set for December, should expand the reach of the business even further into the commercial marketplace, says John Hornsby, general manger of MDA Geospatial Services. "We have made the business plans on our best expectations and knowledge of the marketplace and where the technology may fit in," he says. "As the data stream comes down, we may start to find out things we did think of and some you didn't in positive sense that could materialize into real business. Moving into Radarsat-2, we are trying to steadily grow the business, because we will have new technical capabilities, resolution, polarization and operational performance. There is an expectation that we can take a jump from the business standpoint with the new capabilities."
The planned launch of the new satellites, even though all have been built with significant government financial support, shows that the commercial remote sensing industry has achieved a sense of stability that has been lacking for several years, Hornsby says. "On the commercial side, the business plans haven't achieved what was originally set out, but there are a lot of missions planned, and that reflects some degree of acceptance within the overall user community," he says. "Obviously there is value here. We have gone beyond where we started. We gone from research oriented and non-operational uses to having high-volume, single purpose users getting high volumes of services from Earth observation satellites."
Seizing The Opportunity
The commercial imagery satellite operators learned some valuable lessons in their early years of operations, ones industry officials hope they can use to take even greater advantage of the opportunities that will be made available by the Internet search engines.
"There is more flux and change now in industry than ever before, and that makes it interesting," says Nelson. "Our industry just got turbocharged by the Microsofts and Googles, and they are not going to be happy with our companies just spitting out telemetry and data. We're turning millions more people around the world on to satellite imagery, but the next step I think is something much more dynamic than that."
Jason Bates is the Assistant Editor of Via Satellite magazine.
Email
Comments
Print
Reuse
