EO Satellite OrbView-3 Successfully Launched

Lord Satri writes "Orbview-3 today has joined the flock of Earth Observation satellites. OrbView-3 will deliver 1 m (panchromatic) and 4 m spatial resolution (4 multispectral bands). Amongts other EO high-resolution satellites of importance are QuickBird, Ikonos and Eros-1A."

Metamoderators beware

[njchick]

The parent post was moderated as flamebait by aliens.

These Satellites can be turned around....

[Monster Zero]

I know at least the Quickbird satellite can be turned around to snap pictures of celestial objects. I think there is a picture of the moon taken with Quickbird on the www.digitalglobe.com [digitalglobe.com] website. What I really want is a high-res picture of another satellite - like maybe hubble?

Re:These Satellites can be turned around....

[jfoust]

It's not exactly what you desire, but XSS-10, a microsatellite launched as a secondary payload on a Delta 2 GPS satellite launch in January, took images [boeing.com] of the Delta 2's upper stage in orbit.

Re:These Satellites can be turned around....

[jovlinger]

unless they're flying parallel to each other, delta v is going to be a bitch. blink and you missed it. Makes snapping clear pictures from a zooming low-orbit satellite seem easy..

Does anyone know how they manage to avoid motion blur? A 1 meter resolution, taken at 17K mph (~27K kph ~ 7.5k m/s), gives you on the order of 1/7000th second shutter speed. That's one HELL of a camera if it can do that.

Good for Orbital Sciences

[Valdrax]

This is a good thing for Orbital Sciences. On September 21st, 2001, Orbital Sciences lost a major satellite called Orbview-4 during the launch. I remember this because the project I was working on at the time was under a huge amount of pressure to try and release as soon as possible after Orbview-4 went up. One of the sensors on Orbview-4, Warfighter-1, was a hyperspectral sensor that was going to give the US military a lot of new, valuable data, and we were at risk of losing out a bid against a competitor to provide them with the software to work with this data. Fortunately (for us) when the satellite failed to achieve orbit, we got a several month reprieve to hammer out bugs in the software. On the down side, there was no huge customer base biting at the bit for the software by the time it came out.

Orbital Imaging, the subsidy of Orbital Sciences that launched the probe, was pretty cash-strapped at the time. If I recall correctly, they had to file Chapter 11 after the loss. Fortunately, they insured Orbview-4, so they didn't take a total loss on it. NASA also lost the QuickTOMS (Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer) satellite in the same launch. At the time, they expected the much delayed Orbview-3 to launch sometime last year. Anyway, it's a good thing to see them get this one up in the sky finally. Hopefully, it'll bring them enough revenue to offset their losses from the past few years.

High resolution is cool...

[d-Orb]

..but coverage is also important. While the commercial EO satellite market seems to cater for very commercial applications (surveying and other civil engineering efforts, for example), in other applications (in fact, some of the most interesting ones), global coverage at any available resolution is far more important.

For example, while estimating the biomass of the whole northern hemisphere with sub-millimetre accuracy would be cool, knowing it with a ~10 km accuracy is more than acceptable.

Oh, well, yes, and I do work with microwave radar, and I obviously loathe the high resolution optical (bleurgh!!!) lot :-)))))

Orbview

[shadowbearer]

Did anyone else read that and immediately think of Saruman?

"Now....I see ALLLLLLLL!!!"

SB