- October 29, 2008
- Posted by: EARSC
- Category: Members News
Telespazio, a Finmeccanica/Thales company, has signed an exclusive agreement with the U.S. company GeoEye, Inc., for the production and sale in Europe and North Africa of the high-resolution images, products and services offered by the new GeoEye-1 Earth observation satellite. The satellite was launched from the Vandenberg Air Force Base, California on 6 September.
Under the agreement, Telespazio will also have access to GeoEye’s IKONOS satellite and, after 1 January 2009, will be able to collect, produce and sell Earth images and related products from IKONOS in Europe and North Africa.
GeoEye-1 is a 1.955 kg satellite designed to take high-resolution images of the Earth from a distance of 681 km. The satellite collects images that can distinguish objects on the Earth’s surface as small as 41 cm. It also provides 1.65 m resolution multispectral imagery.
Through a proprietary production capability, GeoEye-1 will provide colour images at 41 cm resolution, which no other commercial imaging company is currently able to match. However, due to current U.S. government licensing regulations, non-U.S. government customers will be given access to GeoEye-1 imagery that has been re-sampled to 50 cm resolution.
Thanks to the agreement signed with GeoEye, Telespazio plans to integrate images from the IKONOS and GeoEye-1 satellites with geographic information systems (GIS) for public and private sector clients. The collection of new optical images from the IKONOS and GeoEye-1, together with the high revisit of radar images from the four satellites in the COSMO-SkyMed constellation, belonging to the Italian Space Agency and Italy’s defence ministry, will allow Telespazio to provide an exclusive information service for natural resource management and national security operations.
With the GeoEye-1 and IKONOS data, Telespazio will be able to make a significant contribution to the development of a number of major European programmes, especially Kopernikus (formerly GMES), and the European Joint Research Centre’s agricultural monitoring service, based on the use of satellite images.
Source Telespazio
