Eye In The Sky Safely Ships To Vandenberg AFB—Launch Prep Proceeds

Part one — mission accomplished. This is what GeoEye, Inc. [NASDAQ: GEOY], a provider of satellite, aerial and geospatial information, may have said when their satellite GeoEye-1 arrived safely at Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB), California. GeoEye-1 is scheduled to launch August 22nd. The 4,300-pound satellite was transported by GeoEye’s prime contractor, General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems from its manufacturing facility in Gilbert, Arizona to VAFB.

GeoEye-1 will launch next month, the culmination of a great team effort. As a result GeoEye will make available to the U.S. Government, and the rest of the world, quality commercial imagery. In addition, the company will provide key customers the imagery needed to meet critical mission requirements. GeoEye-1 will have the highest resolution of any commercial imaging system, or 0.41-meters, or 16 inches, for panchromatic (black and white) imagery and multispectral (color) imagery at 1.65-meter resolution. However, due to U.S. Government licensing restrictions, commercial customers will have access to imagery at half-meter ground resolution. The satellite is designed to offer three-meter accuracy, which means that end-users can map natural and man-made features to within three meters of their actual locations on the surface of the Earth without ground control points.

GeoEye-1 was financed in part by GeoEye’s approximate $500-million contract with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The three specifications the NGA desires most are; spatial resolution; geolocation accuracy; and large-area coverage. The desire is for GeoEye-1 to fulfill these requirements for NGA by providing highly accurate, extremely detailed Earth imagery for broad area coverage and updating geospatial foundational layers and mapping databases. The main command and control facility for GeoEye-1 is at the company’s headquarters in Dulles, Virginia. A back-up command and control site is located at the company’s operations site in Thornton, Colorado near Denver. Three other ground stations will be operated or leased by GeoEye in Alaska, Norway and Antarctica for a total of four key ground stations. GeoEye will need multiple sources for primary data reception since the combined daily collection capacity for both the IKONOS and GeoEye-1 satellites will be nearly one million square kilometers. This also allows GeoEye-1 to be in contact with a station about 40 times each day to receive commands and offload the imagery collected on previous orbits.