DigitalGlobe

DigitalGlobe, of Longmont, Colorado, USA, is a privately held commercial vendor of space imagery and geospatial content, and operator of civilian remote sensing spacecraft. The company offers the world's highest resolution commercial satellite imagery and maintains the most current and accurate content library.

Origins
The company was founded in 1992, as WorldView, with a license from the United States Department of Commerce to build a commercial remote sensing satellite. In 1995, the company became EarthWatch Incorporated, merging WorldView with Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.'s commercial remote sensing operations. In September 2001, EarthWatch became DigitalGlobe.

QuickBird
QuickBird, launched on October 18, 2001, is DigitalGlobe's primary satellite. It was built in partnership with Ball Aerospace and Orbital Sciences, and launched by a Boeing Delta II. It is in a 450 km altitude, –98 degree inclination sun-synchronous orbit. An earlier launch attempt resulted in the loss of QuickBird-1.

WorldView-1
Ball Aerospace built WorldView-1. It was launched at 18:35 GMT on September 18 2007 from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a Delta II 7920-10C. Launch services were provided by United Launch Alliance. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is expected to be a major customer of WorldView-1 imagery.

WorldView-2
Ball Aerospace is currently building WorldView-2. It is scheduled for launch in late 2008. DigitalGlobe has partnered with Boeing for launch of the WorldView satellites on Delta II.

Customers
DigitalGlobe’s customers range from urban planners, to the U.S. federal agencies, including NASA and the United States Department of Defense's National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). As well, much of Google Earth and Google Maps high resolution-imagery is provided by DigitalGlobe, as is imagery used in Microsoft's TerraServer. DigitalGlobe's main competitors are GeoEye (formerly Orbimage and Space Imaging) and Spot Image.

External link

 * Company home page

DigitalGlobe