IKONOS

IKONOS is a commercial earth observation satellite, which the company GeoEye (formerly Space Imaging ) (USA) operates. For Europe, the subsidiary European Space Imaging ( EUSI ) in Munich is responsible, with the participation of the company Space Imaging Middle East LLC in Dubai.

Image acquisition

The high-resolution cameras take both grayscale and color images. Each image represents an area of ​​at least 11 × 11 km with a resolution of up to 82 cm. It can also strip of 11 km in width, and many hundreds of kilometers in length are recorded. A peculiarity of Ikonos satellite is its high level of agility that allows addition, nebeineinander take several shorter, 11 km wide image strips, so that areas of eg 60 × 60 km could be added to a flyover. Since 2002, the subsidiary European Space Imaging accepts headquartered in Munich distribution for Europe.

History

IKONOS comes from the Greek and means something like picture. IKONOS -1 was launched on 27 April 1999, but was already lost at the start. The identical satellite IKONOS -2 was originally supposed to start in 2000. After this failure was IKONOS -2 renamed IKONOS and finally successfully launched on 24 September 1999 in its orbit. The launch took place in each case with an Athena -2 rocket from Launch Complex 6 Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Construction of the satellite

The IKONOS satellite was built by Lockheed Martin. The communication systems, image processing, and the controls were contributed by Raytheon, the digital camera from Eastman Kodak.

Orbit

The satellite orbits the earth at 681 km height 14 times a day with an inclination of 98.1 °. He is thus in a sun-synchronous orbit and flies over the equator in each cycle clock at 10:30 local solar time.

Specifications

  • Assumed service life: 5 to 7 years
  • Mass: 726 kg
  • Dimensions: 1.8 × 1.8 × 1.6 m

The camera is able to accommodate grayscale images with an accuracy of up to 82 cm and multispectral images ( color images) with four channels (blue, green, red and infrared) with an accuracy of up to 3.28 meters. The internal memory of the satellite is 64 GB. To speed up the data transmission to the ground stations, the 11-bit data is compressed, and then transmitted at 320 Mbps.

International Designator Athena (rocket family) Orbital inclination
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