Satellite Imagery: Ikonos MSP

 

Information

Specifications

Sample Imagery

 

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Information

 

Ownership & Access

Space Imaging was founded in December, 1994 in Denver, USA and owns the IKONOS satellite. Although military imagery from satellites at close to one-metre resolution has been available on a classified basis, IKONOS is the first one-metre satellite to be commercially available to the public.

The IKONOS satellite system was built by Lockheed Martin Commercial Space Systems. The communications, image processing and customer service elements were built by Raytheon Company while the camera was built by Eastman Kodak. The satellite was launched aboard a four-stage Lockheed Martin Athena 11 launch vehicle from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, USA. IKONOS imagery is received from Space Imaging.

Launch and Acquisition Dates

Space Imaging launched the worlds first, and currently only, one-metre resolution, commercial satellite, IKONOS, on 24 September, 1999. Since its successful launch, high resolution imagery has been and is still available to the commercial sector. The anticipated life-span of the IKONOS satellite is between five and seven years.

Orbital and Scene Details

IKONOS has a sun-synchronous, near polar orbit which is repetitive, thereby ensuring a full coverage of the entire earth. IKONOS orbits the earth at 681 kms and circles the earth fourteen times a day, once every 98 minutes, on a north-south axis. IKONOS has the ability to collect 20000 km2 in a single pass. The sensor can be inclined to acquire imagery up to 700 km on either side of the track (off-nadir viewing capacity), giving the satellite the capacity to revisit any area on the earth every 1.5 days, albeit with different sensor angles or resolution. The satellite repeats the exact same orbit every 35 days.

IKONOS produces panchromatic (black and white) imagery at one-metre resolution and multispectral (colour) imagery at four-metre resolution. In a one-metre panchromatic image, objects that are one metre in size on the ground can be distinguished, providing they have separate and distinct visual characteristics from other neighbouring objects. For example, objects such as swimming pools, cars, boats and tennis courts are all recognisable because of their context within their surroundings. White stripes in parking lots are also visible because of their sharp contrast with the black asphalt. Multispectral four-metre imagery does not have the spatial clarity of the panchromatic imagery due to its lower resolution however the four-metre multispectral imagery has a much higher spectral resolution due to its four bands in the blue, green, red and near-infrared part of the spectrum. This higher spectral resolution allows the user greater scope for distinguishing between vegetation and soil types and other land use and landcover applications.

Spectral Details

Imagery from IKONOS is available in 11 bits per pixel. However since many remote sensing software systems are unable to cope with 11 bit data, it is possible to obtain high resolution imagery from IKONOS in 8 bit data form.

The panchromatic imagery is available in one band which has a spectral wavelength from 0.45 to 0.9 µm while the multispectral imagery is available in four bands in the blue, green, red and near-infrared part of the spectrum and also ranges from 0.45 to 0.9 µm.

Data from IKONOS with one-metre panchromatic and four-metre multispectral resolution is useful for a variety of applications, of which these are some of the most important:

Cartography. One-metre panchromatic data are ideal for mapping to very high scales, up to 1:5000. In areas where ground surveys are difficult to carry out, due to difficult terrain or political boundaries, mapping using one-metre imagery is particularly useful. In addition, Digital Elevation Models (DEM's) can be constructed from stereo pairs for 3D visualisation.

Defence. A variety of defence applications, for example: Mapping, Strategic Target Detection, Demining and Mission

Planning and Training, can be enhanced by using one-metre satellite imagery.

Urban Planning. Cadastre updating, particularly in rural areas but also in urban areas, is made easier using one- or four-metre satellite imagery. High resolution imagery is used for positioning pipelines and powerlines, rubbishdumps and dams.

Agriculture. The detail for precision farming can be provided by one- and four-metre imagery.

Insurance. One-metre imagery can be used for property damage control and the verification of crop damage, for example: hail, drought and frost.

Details of Product Availability

High resolution IKONOS imagery is available are various levels of correction, including Path, Map and Ortho levels. This imagery has a range of different accuracies depending on the product ordered. The coarsest level of accuracy is the Geo level which is accurate to 1:50 000 while Precision Plus imagery is accurate to up to 1:2400 scale.