GeoEye

GeoEye Inc. (formerly Orbital Imaging Corporation or ORBIMAGE) was an American commercial satellite imagery company based in Herndon, Virginia. GeoEye was merged into the DigitalGlobe corporation January 29th, 2013.

The company was founded in 1992 as a division of Orbital Sciences Corporation in the wake of the 1992 Land Remote Sensing Policy Act which permitted private companies to enter the satellite imaging business. The division was spun off in 1997. It changed its name to GeoEye in 2006 after acquiring Denver, Colorado-based Space Imaging for $58 million. Space Imaging was founded and controlled by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Its principal asset was the IKONOS satellite.

Although ORBIMAGE's first chairman was Orbital chairman David W. Thompson, and Orbital at the time owned more than 60 percent of the stock, it no longer has a substantial interest in the company or its successor.

GeoEye provided 253,000,000 square kilometres (98,000,000 sq mi) of satellite map images to Microsoft and Yahoo! search engines. In 2008 Google secured exclusive online mapping use of the GeoEye-1 satellite. GeoEye maintained major contracts with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for the provision of reconnaissance and imagery data.

GeoEye-2

GeoEye-2 is a planned third generation commercial Earth observation satellite, from GeoEye, currently scheduled to launch mid 2016. The satellite will have a resolution of 31 cm, making it the highest resolution commercial Earth observation satellite in orbit, once it has been launched. Due to recent government approval, it will not be encumbered by the 50cm resolution restrictions imposed on its predecessors.

The imaging sensor was manufactured by ITT Exelis, and the satellite is now owned by DigitalGlobe due to the merger of GeoEye and DigitalGlobe in February 2013.

GeoEye-2 will join two other GeoEye-managed satellites, GeoEye-1 and IKONOS, already in orbit. Assuming that both these satellites continue to operate, this will give GeoEye three sub-metre satellites in orbit, and the ability to offer its customers daily revisits. RapidEye already provides this capability on a commercial basis, but its satellites only offer 5 metre resolution.

Lockheed Martin, the builder of IKONOS, has been selected as the builder of the satellite platform over General Dynamics the builder of GeoEye-1. General Dynamics lost money on the fixed contract for GeoEye-1 and could not come to terms with GeoEye.

GeoEye-1

GeoEye-1 is a high-resolution earth observation satellite owned by GeoEye, which was launched in September 2008.

History

On December 1, 2004, General Dynamics C4 Systems announced it had been awarded a contract worth approximately $209 million to build the OrbView-5 satellite. Its sensor is designed by the ITT Exelis.

The satellite, now known as GeoEye-1, was originally scheduled for April 2008 but lost its 30-day launch slot to a U.S. government mission which had been delayed. It was rescheduled for launch August 22, 2008 from Vandenberg Air Force Base aboard a Delta II launch vehicle. The launch was postponed to September 4, 2008, due to unavailability of the Big Crow telemetry-relay aircraft. It was delayed again to September 6 because Hurricane Hanna interfered with its launch crews.

The launch took place successfully on September 6, 2008 at 11:50:57 a.m. PDT (18:50:57 UTC). The GeoEye-1 satellite separated successfully from its Delta II launch vehicle at 12:49 p.m. PDT (19:49 UTC), 58 minutes and 56 seconds after launch.