GeoEye-1

GeoEye -1 is the name of an observation satellite of the American company GeoEye.

Mission and payload

It is located on a 681 km high sun-synchronous orbit with an inclination of 98.1 °. In the visible range (at panchromatic recording) he achieved a spatial resolution of less than 0.5 m, for color images or images in the infrared (in the case of multispectral recording) by 1.65 m. Also stereoscopic images are possible. The swath width amounts to 15.2 km where the cameras can record up to 60 ° off-normal images. GeoEye -1 recorded daily an area twice as large as Germany and sends the data for processing to the ground stations. For this purpose, in 1955 kg satellite has an internal memory capacity of 1 terabit and a transmission channel with 150 or 740 Mbit / s in the X band. Customers include the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Google and the National Geospatial -Intelligence Agency. The lifetime of the satellite more than seven years are planned, with the fuel supply is designed for 15 years.

The launch took place on September 6, 2008 from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a Delta II rocket.

Manufacturer is General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems (AIS ).

The contract for the construction of GeoEye -2 was awarded to Lockheed Martin. The start of this sequel was planned for spring 2013, but was canceled after the company GeoEye had merged with its competitor DigitalGlobe. The satellite was stored indefinitely.

Ground stations

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