spacetoday.net: DigitalGlobe announces new satellite plans

Posted: Tue, Mar 23, 2004, 7:45 PM ET (0045 GMT)
Commercial remote sensing company DigitalGlobe announced Tuesday that it will launch a new imaging satellite by the end of 2006 that will provide the sharpest commercially-available images ever. The WorldView satellite, scheduled for launch "no later than" 2006, will be capable of taking images with a resolution of 0.5 meters per pixel, or multispectral images with a resolution of two meters per pixel. That resolution will beat out the company's existing satellite, QuickBird, which has a resolution of just over 0.6 meters per pixel. WorldView will also be in a higher orbit than QuickBird, at an altitude of nearly 800 kilometers, giving it a wider field of view and decreasing revisit time. DigitalGlobe didn't specify a launch vehicle for the satellite, but did say that Boeing Launch Services would launch the spacecraft. The satellite is primarily funded by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) under a $500 million NextView contract awarded last fall. NGA will award a second NextView contract later this year, with several companies, including Space Imaging and Orbimage, which also have commercial imaging satellites, expected to compete.