The biggest advance in earth-monitoring remote sensing systems from the 1990s into the next Millenium has been the significant privatization or commercialization of the field as it continues to grow through both aerial and space observing systems. The principal new feature of these systems is high spatial resolution - comparable to earlier "spy" satellites. The germane point: remote sensing has become a business, not just an endeavor by governments to demonstrate the value of going into space to learn about the Earth.
Because of the great costs involved, until the last decade most satellites that look at the Earth or make geophysical measurements have been conceived, designed, built, launched, and subsequently operated either by government agencies or have supported (underwritten) in part by government funds. Since the early 1960s, of the approximately 2400 satellites in orbit - with many active (now operating), most are/were either military in origin or flown as a general service to a gradually developed user community by the U.S., France, Russia, India, Japan and other governments. Many satellites were directed towards scientific research or as monitoring systems that make environmental observations. In time some new satellites are/were developed by companies that have entered what can be called "Space Business".
This has led to what is referred to as "the commercialization of space (imagery)". Commercialization falls into two principal categories: 1) the sale of imagery or data from space satellites inaugurated by governments (national space programs, such as Landsat; this includes products made available to this industry from both U.S. and International space programs; see page I-23), and specialized services such as image interpretation or other processing (e.g., map making) related to the data; and 2) actual development of completely private satellites, their launching, data retrieval, and data (image) distribution, and their marketing. This second category is the subject of this page (thus, it omits discussion of any satellite program primarily sponsored by a government). The Earthsat Corporation is a good example of the first category; Space Imaging of the second.
At the beginning commercial firms had been concerned principally with communications satellites. In that category are ComSat, IntelSat, PanAmSat, Inmarsat, and Eutelsat. For much of this earlier period, earth observations and resources satellites as well as most meteorological satellites - two groups relying on visual image gathering - have remained the province of
governmental sponsorship and control. The shift from government programs
for space platforms mounting remote sensors to programs devised and funded by
private industry has been slow and only now, after 25 years since Landsat 1,
has commercialization of earth-observing satellites begun to take off. This contrasts with one of the first privatized
space programs developed first by NASA (aided by other federal agencies): namely, communications satellites, which with the incorporation of Comsat began in just a few years
to assume a lead role in which development and capitalization from industry became the mainstay. Launch vehicles (i.e., rockets) also were built by commercial firms to put private satellites into space. As we saw on page I-23, by the 1980s the success of the Landsats prompted
other governments across the world to underwrite ventures into satellite remote
sensing. Some of these branched into the private sector in time. The SPOT program
developed by the French, with first launch in 1986, soon thereafter became the
pervue of a commercial corporation, SPOT Image. The Indian government began its IRS program
in 1988. The European Space Agency (ESA) actuated its ERS-1 and -2 operational
satellites beginning in 1990 as did the Japanese Space Agency (NASDA), with
JERS-1 the same year. The Canadians entered the picture with their Radarsat
in 1991. In all of these the governments developed and launched the satellites
but either created or arranged with private corporations for the operation of
the data gathering and distribution system. Governments are still key players in recent and
impending launches of an ever-increasing variety of space platforms and sensor
systems. In the early days, the principal
users of civilian remote sensing data (aside from the military who have always
been involved in reconnaissance systems) in the U.S. were government agencies, state agencies, and academia. With Landsat, industry came to recognize the basic
value of the synoptic coverage afforded by space systems and started to purchase
data in abundance. To handle dissemination to all kinds
of users, the Dept. of the Interior through its U.S. Geological Survey established
the EROS Data Center (EDC) in Sioux Falls, S.D. Its primary sales were a mix of Landsat
data and aerial photography. NOAA continued to supply meteorological remote
sensing output that rapidly began to effect forecasting and presentation of
weather changes appearing in newspapers and on radio and TV. A number of companies offering value-added services, mainly to industry, emerged starting in the 1970s. One with whom the writer (NMS) has had repeated contacts is the Earthsat Corporation in Rockville, MD, which provides a wide range of capabilities including a full analysis of a given application
problem. (On the Internet, you can find sites both under the Earthsat name, but also under MDA-Federal, since the company has been purchased by McDonald-Dettwiler Associates.) Other companies have concentrated on providing software for image processing and
analysis to be performed at the customer's facility. ERDAS in Atlanta, GA. was
one of the first in this field. Many other software programs have been developed
since the 1970s, some by commercial firms and others by universities (e.g.,
IDRISI, used in this Tutorial; developed in the Geography Department at Clark
University). As GIS grew into a major means of handling geospatial data and
solving problems related to siting, land use, environmental monitoring, etc.
a few companies, such as ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute) and
Arc/Info sprang up to offer services and since then many more have joined in
providing powerful programs that convolve GIS operations with image processing
tools. Some indication of the breadth of
services now available from commercial organizations can be garnered from at
the lists and ads in the Green Book: Who's Who in the GeoTechnologies, published
each year by EOM, Aurora, CO (http://www.eomonline.com). The first push to privatize remote
sensing is traceable to some key historical dates in the Landsat program. (This
is treated in some detail in the Landsat Chronology put together by Ed Sheffner
at the Ames Research Center [NASA], at: http://geo.arc.nasa.gov/sge/landsat/lpchron.html.)
In 1979, NASA relinquished operation of its Landsats (Landsat-3 had been launched
by then) to NOAA. At the start of the Reagan administration, the drive for commercialization
was accelerated. During 1984, the Dept. of Commerce set into motion procedures
for privatizing remote sensing in those areas under conditions that did not
conflict with military interests. Out of this, an agreement was reached in 1985
for the newly incorporated Eosat in Landover, MD, formed by Hughes and RCA,
to operate the Landsat program for 10 years while EROS continued in its role
as the National Archive for all land images. However, in 1992 a government decision
was made to return the development and launching of Landsat-7 to the Dept. of
Defense in cooperation with NASA; DoD opted out of the program by 1996 and Landsat-7
was dovetailed into the EOS/MPTE program. By 1996, however, Landsat-7 had reverted
to NASA to operate, with its data to be distributed by an EOSDIS facility built
at the EROS Data Center to handle the distribution of the multi-terrabytes of
data that will ensue from the MPTE program. It is noteworthy that Landsat-7
will be the first satellite ever to be programmed to gather and archive complete
global land scene sets several times a year. The commercial entities' policies
are generally to acquire only scenes ordered by customers. To assure that possibilities for commercialization of remote sensing satellites could prosper and
continue on a parallel course with this and other government programs,
an important workshop entitled The New Millenium Program was held at JPL in
1996 to foster coordination of government and private industry in those aspects
of remote sensing that rely on expensive spacecraft to gather data. The inception of commercial satellite remote sensing
probably began with the Eosat (now SpaceImaging) Corp.'s development in the 1980s as a business enterprise. Another early player in providing satellite remote sensing services was the Earthsat Corp., for years in Bethesda and now in Rockville, MD.
As commercial involvement took root, the demands for higher resolution imagery from the user community prompted these businesses to lobby for improvements in resolution - which at first conflicted with military policy. Heretofore, the only way to get such pictures was with aerial photography, which was restricted to regions in a country open to civilian access. (Landsat, SPOT, etc. had, however, opened up the entire globe to surveillance at lower resolutions.) In time, as we shall see, this improved resolution was permitted - allowing the industry to take off. Today, high resolution imagery of the entire world (except in some systems the polar regions) is now available to all users; the tradeoff is that such images are generally limited to individual scenes that cover smaller areas (requiring more adjacent scenes to duplicate the regional coverage that Landsat attains, by piecing the images together as mosaics). The big breakthrough in making satellite remote sensing products both highly desirable and readily available for general and commercial use was the result of the Russian program in the early 1990's to sell high spatial resolution data on the open market. Prior to that, U.S.-influenced military restrictions had placed a lower limit on allowable resolution so as to maintain the class of remote sensors that were known as "spy satellites". The Russians, in need of foreign capital, released many of the military camera photographs taken from space at resolutions of a few meters. In 1998, the Russian space program began to digitize their KR-1000 camera images, then placed these for sale to the entire world. This became known as the SPIN-2 program. Here is an example of a 2-meter image of central Bangkok, in Thailand: The Russian space program has remained the principal supplier of high resolution space photography, with pictures obtained onboard and returned in capsules, up to the present. (Its obvious disadvantage is the finite limits of film that can be packed onboard.) Among camera types used are the KVR-1000, KVR-3000, and KFA-1000. Two examples: Soon after the Russian products appeared on the open market, encouraged by the anticipation that the United States would shortly waver its resolution restrictions various private corporations began to consider the possibilities in developing and operating high resolution satellites. These they would build but launch still required government-operated facilities - at first the U.S.(Vandenberg AFB in Calif.; Cape Canaveral in Florida), the French (in French Guiana along the northeast coast of S. America), and the Russians (in the northwestern Siberia and the southern steppes of central Asia). It was envisioned at this time that such satellites could compete with the aerial photography industry (although aerial photos can routinely provide pictures that were less than 0.3 meters in resolution). Thus, a combination of govenment-furnished space imagery and that supplied by private corporations - all with a range of resolutions and sensor systems - together moved earth observations into a new range of opportunities that have wide commercial implications. Besides the U.S. Federal government, Canada, the Europeans, the Russians, the Indians, and the Japanese all have active remote sensing programs based on satellite observations; their products are available to anyone on a commercial basis. In the U.S., three companies are now launching their own satellites, lately on commercial rockets:
Space Imaging, Inc (company now named GeoEye),
Digital Globe (formerly EarthWatch), Inc., and Orbital Sciences Corp. (before reorganization known as Orbital Imaging Corp. or just "Orbital"). All are supplying or will produce high resolution, multispectral products, as well as images taken with wide-angle viewing instruments that provide broad area coverage. We have seen several examples of these images in Sections of this Tutorial, including at the outset page 2 of the Overview. We now supplement these images with several examples that have been downloaded from the above Internet sites.
First, we feature SpaceImaging's (headquartered in Thornton, Colorado) IKONOS-2; here is the satellite where it was built by Lockheed-Martin Missiles and Space Systems of Colorado:
The IKONOS satellites are multispectral, having approximately the same bands as the Landsat MSS plus a blue band, so that both natural and false color composites can be made: These spectral band images provide 4 meter resolution. In addition, like SPOT, there is a very high resolution panchromatic sensor that produces a 1 meter black and white image. The spectral response curve for that sensor, and an example of its image product, are:
Here is an IKONOS high resolution panchromatic scene that shows the pyramids outside of Cairo, Egypt.
This example of high resolution IKONOS color composites shows a 1 meter image (involving registration of a pan image with the spectral band images) of Launch Pad 40, used mainly by the military at NASA's Cape Canaveral:
Two more, from Space Imaging (now GeoEye). At the top is another 1 meter color image showing a cruise ship at berth in the harbor of Rio de Janeiro:
The other image, at 4 meters, shows a dissected plateau near Kelan in the Shanxi Province of China; the peculiar curved markings were not identified but the writer thinks they may be some kind of agricultural plow patterns:
Quickbird-2 is the flagship of Digital Globe, a company located in Longmont, Colorado. Here is this spacecraft shown in its fabrication room at the builder, Ball Bros., also in Colorado:
The spacecraft orbits at 450 km. Its multiband sensors provide two levels of high resolution: 1) at 2.4 m, with red, green, blue and near IR bands; and 2) 0.64 m, with a panchromatic (wide wavelength) band. More details about these sensors are found on this Satellite Imaging, Inc. (a company allied with Digital Globe) site.
Here is a panband image of Madrid, Spain:
The next image shows part of Sunnyvale, California next to the Moffett Field airbase where NASA's Ames Research Center is located. This color image achieves a 0.64 m by using a registered panchromatic image. The image illustrates one problem that can distort and image. Note that some buildings appear to be non-rectangular and one tall building seems to be leaning. For low altitude aerial photography this occurs as described in Section 10 but in this case the spacecraft sensor telescope was not pointed vertically downward, so that all buildings tend to be misshapen. Here are three more Quickbird images, each looking at a noteworthy ground feature. The first pictures the largest community in the Antarctic, the McMurdo Sound Base managed by the United States. Below that is a view of the Pentagon (a year after it was damaged by a terrorist air assault) on the Virginia side of the Potomac River outside Washington, D.C. The bottom is a view of the Statue of Liberty in the New York Harbor at the mouth of the Hudson River, enlarged from the full Quickbird image. Both SpaceImaging and DigitalGlobe really "came into their own" during the Iraqi war of 2003, since each provided exceptional images of all of Iraq both before and during the battles, as we have seen in the Overview. This provided exceptional publicity for the capabilities of their product.
Another company, Keystone, Inc., which had previously sold maps and other information based on images from the two above companies, became a supplier to many of the TV networks covering the military campaigns in Iraq. When taken over by Google, it eventually morphed into the familiar Google Earth. This is probably the best known example of the use of remote sensing to the everyday person, appearing frequently in news broadcasts; Digital Globe is the principal supplier of high resolution imagery for Google Earth, but images from other satellite (sources) is also used. The history of Google Earth is set forth on this Wikipedia web site. There is also a market for synoptic imagery, i.e, at the other extreme, in which large tracts of land or sea, at subcontinental scales, are depicted in color but at low resolutions. OrbImage (its full name is Orbital Imaging Corp.), headquartered in Dulles, VA, is presently filling this need. This company claims to have been the first to launch a purely commercially-developed remote sensing satellite in April of 1995. Its OrbView-1, shown below, was designed to monitor lightning worldwide, and needed only a panchromatic sensor at low resolution: OrbView-2, launched in August, 1997, operates from an altitude of 765 km, and produces images with 1 km resolution that extend over a swath width of up to 2800 km; revisit time is 1 day. Its sensor has 8 channels ranging from 0.4 to 2.8 µm. Here is the "bird" before launch: Two images exemplify the products currently being sold by OrbImage. The first shows Mexico; the second the Himalayas and northern India. Reacting to the popularity of high resolution commercial imagery, OrbImage will launch OrbView-3 in the Spring of 2003 to a planned altitude of 470 km. Its 4-band (0.45 to 0.90 µm range) will provide images at 1 and 4 meter resolution, having dimensions of 8 km widths. OrbImage has also entered into partnership with MacDonald-Detwiler of Vancouver, BC to operate RadarSat-2 as a commercial venture providing radar imagery. Israel decided it wished to enter the space imagery market in the 1980s. With some government "seed money", ImageSat International was incorporated. It launched its first satellite, EROS-1, on December 5, 2000: The spacecraft carries a single sensor which produces a panchromatic (black & white) image at two resolutions, 3.3 meters (swath width of 12.5 km) and 1.8 m (swath width 6.5 km). Here is an EROS-1 image of central Stockholm, Sweden:
The idea behind this satellite was to provide high resolution black and white images. Because other satellites could provide multispectral images at almost the same resolution, ImageSat did not get their expected market share. A second EROS, slightly larger than the first, was put into orbit on April 25, 2006. Its panchromatic imagery has a spatial resolution of 0.7 m, making it one of the best systems available. Here is its view of the Vatican:
The future looks bright for commercial remote sensing (see Section 21 for additional information). As more users purchase these products, the prices of individual scenes have dropped to under $2000. The ability to get the data as individual bands, so as to allow some image processing like that described in Section 1 and Appendix B, makes these scenes ever more attractive compared to the more conventional aerial photography that met the needs of wide areas of coverage at high resolutions. In time, more companies, from different nations, will emerge on their own (without government subsidies). The sensor systems will tend towards wider spectral range coverage, including thermal. In the foreseeable future, hyperspectral remote sensing - the "creme de la creme" of sensor capability - will become commonplace both from space and from aerial platforms.
The upshot of the review of government space program, military, and civilian (commercial) earth-observing remote sensors in space as examined on this and preceding pages is this: there are now so many systems actively looking down at the planet that it is likely the any spot on the surface can be imaged on demand on any given day - provided cloud cover is favorably low.
If you wish to learn more about the history and prospect for space commercialization of remote sensing, a tour of entries in your Search Engine will bring up 1000s of Web sites. Most are of limited value. Some tie commercialization with Space Law. The U.S. Congress has passed several enabling Acts. The Department of Commerce has part of the responsibility for satellite commercialization programs. Within NASA, the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi is managing many of the diverse space commercialization ventures. Some insight into how commercialization fits into satellite remote sensing can be gained from this Brief History of Operational Remote Sensing site. A review of difficulties as well as potentialities for commercial remote sensing is presented in this Rand Corp site (in .pdf format).
Primary Author: Nicholas M. Short, Sr.