TechJournal

GeoEye is the premier provider of geospatial information for the national security community, strategic partners, resellers and commercial customers to help them better map, measure and monitor the world.  They have recently launched a satellite GeoEye-1 last September and it began its mission of photographing the earth with high resolution lenses.  One of GeoEye's most visible customers is Google.

Google Maps is now the leading mapping service on the internet and they are doing a pretty good job about it.  Lately they have signed an exclusive contract with GeoEye to provide them with satellite imagery of the Earth's surface.

Today, GeoEye released the first image from the GeoEye-1 Satellite.  These kinds of images will soon be available on Google Maps.

Matthew O'Connell, GeoEye's chief executive officer, said, "We are pleased to release the first GeoEye-1 image, bringing us even closer to the start of the satellite's commercial operations and sales to our customers. This is a remarkable achievement, and I want to thank all of our employees, customers, especially the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, strategic partners, vendors and investors for their support."

GeoEye-1 simultaneously collects 0.41-meter ground resolution black-and-white imagery in the panchromatic mode and 1.65-meter color (multispectral). This first image showing Kutztown University located midway between Reading and Allentown, Penn. was produced by fusing the satellite's panchromatic and multispectral data to produce a high-quality, true-color half-meter resolution image. Though the satellite collects imagery at 0.41-meter ground resolution, due to U.S. licensing restrictions, commercial customers will only get access to imagery that has been processed to half-meter ground resolution. [Press Release]

The images are  definitely sharper than the existing images on Google Maps and Google Earth.  However with the government restrictions, the public will not be able to relish the entire capability of the satellite.  Nevertheless, Google Maps will be a lot better with images from GeoEye-1 and hopefully finish the entire world in high resolution with GeoEye-2 in 2011.

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