Regulatory Change Will Help Our Customers See the Earth More clearly!
With the exciting news announced earlier this morning, relaxing a U.S. Government licensing restriction on the resolution of commercial imagery, DigitalGlobe can now enable improved decision making for our customers by providing more complete information through a clearer picture of our changing planet.
Having the highest available resolution is extremely important because it directly correlates with the amount of information you can extract from an image. Once an image is collected, new information can’t be added through software or processing tricks. You can make a sharp image blurry, but not the other way around. And that’s why imagery from DigitalGlobe is superior to any commercial product available today. We deliver the greatest amount of information by collecting the highest resolution imagery in the market.
The Big Picture
Our current constellation of five high resolution satellites include two that can collect better than .50m images today and can now be commercially sold at their best native resolution. We are substantially expanding our constellation by adding two more high resolution satellites. WorldView-3 is set to launch on August 13 or 14 will be permitted to sell .25m panchromatic and 1.0m multispectral GSD six months after it is operational and GeoEye-2, is currently being stored on the ground and is currently expected to launch when DigitalGlobe secures threshold customer demand for assured access to very high resolution satellite minutes.
Additionally, we will be moving our Worldview-1 satellite into an afternoon orbit, improving the diversity of our constellation by collecting images over a specific location on Earth in the morning with any of our four satellites and then again in the afternoon with WorldView-1. This temporal diversity provides unparalleled access to imagery and information that is unavailable through any other provider.
What does this mean for specific industries?
Better resolution will benefit DigitalGlobe’s customers in several market segments and will enable improved decision-making that will save our customers lives, resources and time. In the past, collecting sub-50 cm resolution required chartering and flying aircraft. This is expensive, time-consuming, and can be limited by denied airspace or dangerous conditions. Now customers will have global access to these hard to reach places at higher resolutions.
In the civil government vertical, sub-half-meter imagery provides more accurate feature detection and identification. This is particularly important for more accurate and automated land use/land cover mapping, as well as change detection applications for natural resources management, urban planning, and emergency response mapping.
For the Location Based Services (LBS) industry the new license will allow customers and portal users to see crisper, clearer mapping images, allowing for better feature recognition for automobile and personal navigation, fleet management, and nautical navigation applications.
Additional applications such as oil and gas, mining and exploration, post-event assessment and humanitarian monitoring are just some of the sectors that will be able to take advantage of our higher resolution products. From more accurate monitoring of pipeline assets to higher levels of detail and accuracy in volumetric calculations, our enhanced imagery completeness will help you do your job more efficiently and effectively.
This is a significant leap forward for the satellite industry, enabling better information and insight from imagery and ushering a new era in geospatial big data. Better resolution means more information and better decisions moving DigitalGlobe another step forward toward our Purpose of Seeing a Better World™.