Article Abstracts | October 2007
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Getting a Better View from Above
Commercial satellite technology means more accurate object location and expanded spectral bands for color imaging.
by Hank Hogan, Contributing Editor
If events go as planned, by mid-October a new eye in the sky will be beaming down views of the Earth that are more accurate than ever. In addition, a new generation of mapping and remote sensing satellites will carry the latest imagers. Thanks to technological improvements, the satellites will see smaller details, use more spectral bands and locate objects more accurately on the ground than current commercial systems.
First to fly
The first of the new mapping satellites scheduled to fly is Worldview-1 from DigitalGlobe Inc. of Longmont, Colo. (Figure 2). Within a month of its mid-September launch, the satellite is supposed to begin capturing either black-and-white or panchromatic images of points directly below it at 50-cm resolution. As it orbits at 496 km and travels from pole to pole, it will image a swath that is 17.7 km wide. The predicted accuracy with which objects can be located on the Earth — or geolocated — within those images is 3.0 m, a figure that improves by one-third if ground-based points with known locations are within the picture...
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