Editor’s note: Maxar’s product managers have been sharing how more high-resolution imagery from the company’s new WorldView Legion satellites will improve their products. Other blog posts in this series can be found here.
Thousands of customers around the world rely on Maxar’s very high-resolution satellite imagery to help inform critical, time-sensitive decisions, power navigation applications and provide context to current conditions. More specifically, they rely on access to Maxar’s industry-leading, 30 cm-class imagery—the highest resolution commercial satellite imagery available today—to help see, map and understand global change in detail.
Our new WorldView Legion satellites are raising the bar by tripling our 30 cm-class capacity and increasing our revisit rate to up to 15 times per day in high-demand areas when all six satellites join the Maxar constellation. These fresh collections of high-resolution imagery will drive the next generation of Earth intelligence and satellite imagery products.
Increased collection of 30 cm-class and 15 cm HD content
WorldView Legion will bring Maxar’s daily imaging capacity up to more than six million sq km per day, allowing us to provide customers more insights to solve critical business and mission needs. We’ll use the new 30 cm-class resolution imagery and our proprietary HD technology to produce more 15 cm HD imagery, enabling enhanced visual clarity and a sharpness on par with aerial imagery.
Defense and intelligence customers leverage Maxar’s high-resolution satellite imagery to monitor areas of interest to better inform decision-making. Consumer-facing mapmakers require 15 cm HD imagery to keep their maps updated in dense urban locations, while governments use it to monitor illegal activities for regulatory compliance. Oil and gas customers monitor pipelines, oil pads and offshore drilling structures with our imagery. WorldView Legion plays a vital role in bringing detailed views of what matters most to customers so they can make better decisions before sending resources on-location.
Higher revisit
To paint a picture of changing ground conditions, a satellite must revisit and image the same location multiple times. The Maxar constellation has historically operated in sun-synchronous orbits with 3-4 revisits of a single location per day. The first two WorldView Legion satellites are in this sun-synchronous orbit, but our next four WorldView Legions will be in mid-inclination orbit, focusing their cameras on the most populated areas of Earth at various times throughout the day.
This key differentiator opens up a new set of monitoring capabilities as our satellites will now be able to image regions of the world at different times of the day, potentially revealing new insights and patterns of human behavior.
This high revisit capability, including collections at new times of day, will serve a crucial purpose during events such as large-scale disasters. We’ll be able to provide multiple views of natural disasters as they unfold and as rescue and recovery efforts begin. Increasing revisit times will enable more comprehensive monitoring over key areas to support improved infrastructure monitoring and surveillance capabilities. Having a more complete picture ensures decision-makers are empowered with the right tools and information in a timely manner.
Increased mapping flexibility
Large-scale mapping customers require visually consistent, 30 cm resolution imagery over highly populated areas to create current, derivative products such as consumer navigation maps, land cover classification maps and thematic layers. Site monitoring on the other hand necessitates higher agility point collects over targeted areas. WorldView Legion provides the ability to serve both use cases under a single platform enabling a broader set of use cases using the same source imagery.
WorldView Legion imagery now available
In October 2024, the first two WorldView Legion satellites entered commercial operations. Customers who access our DailyTake imagery or recent archive imagery will be able to view and use WorldView Legion imagery in their workflows, gaining a high-resolution, current view of areas of the world that impact their operations and decisions.
Gain more context and clarity
WorldView Legion is providing more 30 cm-class satellite imagery for customer missions around the globe.