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| News
2008 |
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29/10/2008
Telespazio signs an agreement with GeoEye to sell images from the GeoEye-1 satellite in Europe and North Africa
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Telespazio, a Finmeccanica/Thales company,
has signed an exclusive agreement with the
U.S. company GeoEye, Inc., for the production
and sale in Europe and North Africa of the
high-resolution images, products and services
offered by the new GeoEye-1 Earth observation
satellite. The satellite was launched from
the Vandenberg Air Force Base, California
on 6 September.
Under the agreement, Telespazio will also
have access to GeoEye’s IKONOS satellite
and, after 1 January 2009, will be able
to collect, produce and sell Earth images
and related products from IKONOS in Europe
and North Africa.
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GeoEye-1 is a 1.955 kg satellite designed
to take high-resolution images of the
Earth from a distance of 681 km. The satellite
collects images that can distinguish objects
on the Earth’s surface as small as 41
cm. It also provides 1.65 m resolution
multispectral imagery.
Through a proprietary production capability,
GeoEye-1 will provide colour images at
41 cm resolution, which no other commercial
imaging company is currently able to match.
However, due to current U.S. government
licensing regulations, non-U.S. government
customers will be given access to GeoEye-1
imagery that has been re-sampled to 50
cm resolution.
Thanks to the agreement signed with GeoEye,
Telespazio plans to integrate images from
the IKONOS and GeoEye-1 satellites with
geographic information systems (GIS) for
public and private sector clients. The
collection of new optical images from
the IKONOS and GeoEye-1, together with
the high revisit of radar images from
the four satellites in the COSMO-SkyMed
constellation, belonging to the Italian
Space Agency and Italy’s defence ministry,
will allow Telespazio to provide an exclusive
information service for natural resource
management and national security operations.
With the GeoEye-1 and IKONOS data, Telespazio
will be able to make a significant contribution
to the development of a number of major
European programmes, especially Kopernikus
(formerly GMES), and the European Joint
Research Centre’s agricultural monitoring
service, based on the use of satellite
images.
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