From The American Surveyor Magazine… The Editor pays a visit to the headquarters of Earth Imagine leader, GeoEye.
Fom August 1960, when a capsule containing exposed film from the first classified military reconnaissance satellite was parachuted back to Earth, to present day 2009, when better than half-meter satellite imagery is available to the public, we have witnessed quantum leaps in space-borne imagery. One company that has been at the forefront of the modern era of this revolution is GeoEye, a company created when Orbimage acquired Colorado-based Space Imaging in January 2006. Growth continued as GeoEye acquired M. J. Harden, a traditional photogrammetry company, in March 2007. GeoEye has grown from the smallest U.S. commercial imagery satellite operator to one of the largest in the world in five years. Today it gathers imagery from GeoEye-1, IKONOS, OrbView-2 and traditional aerial photogrammetry. Both GeoEye-1 and IKONOS are high-resolution electro-optical satellites. As of October 2009, GeoEye had collected a combined 340 million square kilometers of imagery.
While GeoEye’s primary customers are the defense and intelligence communities within the U.S. government, plans are underway to expand into markets that will serve surveyors and engineers. We recently met with Mark Brender, GeoEye’s vice president of Communications to learn more about its offerings to the land development community. Earlier this year, GeoEye announced its partnership with Google, Inc. to supply imagery for Google Earth and Google Maps. Users of popular online mapping programs can already see the impact of high-resolution imagery that has replaced previous low-resolution and outdated imagery.
GeoEye-1, the company’s premier satellite, was launched in September 2008 and incorporates two technologies that dramatically increase its accuracy.
View the entire Article HERE on Amerisurv.com