"Eye" in the sky offers Unprecedented Hi Res images

GeoEye's New Satellite Offers Unprecedentedly Sharp Images

It's getting harder and harder to hide.

The sharpest commercial imaging satellite ever launched is now orbiting the Earth, sweeping over the North Pole and under the South Pole every 98 minutes, collecting high-resolution images of the scene below.

From 423 miles up, the GeoEye-1 satellite can spot objects as small as 16 inches across. Home plate is visible on a baseball diamond. Obviously, then, so are trucks, troops, aircraft on runways, ships at sea and other items of particular interest to the U.S. military.

And the military will be GeoEye's biggest customer. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency had agreed to buy $197 million worth of imagery over 18 months.

An NGA spokesman said the agency already buys images that cover about 122 million square kilometers a year. Those images are gathered by GeoEye satellites Ikonos and OrbView-2. NGA image purchases could double when the higher-resolution GeoEye-1 images are available, he said.

The NGA paid GeoEye $237 million to help build the satellite - nearly half the satellite's $502 million construction and launch costs.

Another big customer is Google. The Internet giant bought exclusive rights to GeoEye images for use in its online mapping application. Google expects to sell maps to customers as diverse as mining companies, land developers and farmers.

Speeding along at 4.5 miles per second, the 4,300-pound satellite passes over any given point on earth once every three days, GeoEye spokesman Mark Brender said.

At a resolution of 0.41 centimeters, GeoEye-1 is not the keenest eye in the sky, as classified U.S. intelligence satellites are believed to see in even greater detail. But the growing demand for imagery makes GeoEye-1 a useful addition to U.S. spying capabilities.

GeoEye published its satellite's first image Oct. 8.: a razor-sharp color shot of the campus of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. The college was the first thing the satellite saw when controllers opened its camera door, company officials said. Using an ordinary desktop computer, it is possible to zoom in enough on the image to pick out two tennis players on a green court, pedestrians on sidewalks, traffic maneuvering through an intersection, and the "Golden Bears" logo etched into one end zone of the college football field.