“No place on Earth can escape our gaze,” said Mark Brender, GeoEye’s vice president of communications.
Earlier this year, GeoEye announced a partnership with Google to provide the satellite imagery for Google Earth and Google Maps. While Brender said that he could not describe the details or numbers for the partnership with Google, he did say that it was “an important and significant contract.”
“Our entire advertising budget couldn’t do what Google Earth does for us,” Brender admitted. “The search engine is not only a good customer, but also a megaphone, making the world aware of the power of satellite imagery.”
Although its partnership with Google is how the public is beginning to recognize the company, the work it does for Google is only a small part of the work the organization completes.
GeoEye’s primary customers are the defense and intelligence communities within the U.S. government, but the company also works with foreign nations, as well.
The company’s single biggest customer is the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which contributed to GeoEye’s estimated revenue of $270-$280 million this year. About 30 percent of their total revenue will come from foreign governments and 17 percent will come from commercial customers.
While some users have been impressed by the imagery found on Google Earth, having found an overhead shot of their residences and other locations, those images will only improve with newer, high-resolution shots provided by GeoEye.
GeoEye-1, the company’s premiere satellite, was launched in September 2008 and, from space, is able to see an object on Earth as small as 16 inches in size. The satellite incorporates two technologies to increase its accuracy: a military-grade GPS receiver (the first commercial satellite with a GPS of this caliber) and star trackers. The satellite is capable of a .41-meter resolution, but the government requires GeoEye to downgrade the quality to 0.5 meters for publicly-available imagery.
The company is currently developing another satellite, GeoEye-2, which will be capable of 0.25 meters, enabling customers to see an object less than 10 inches in size. As of this month, the company has spent about $60 million on GeoEye-2, which is expected to be complete by 2013.
Government Control
GeoEye is licensed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a division of the Department of Commerce.
If NOAA determines that images captured by GeoEye are a threat to national security, or if there is a political concern, the government can interrupt the company’s commercial service and order the satellites not to capture images of certain areas of the Earth, Brender said.
That said, the agency has never issued that order, according to Brender. The closest NOAA has come was after Sept. 11, when the agency entered into a business contract with the company and bought all of the images of Afghanistan, preventing GeoEye from selling the images to other customers – but even that was only for a three-month period, Brender said.
In the event that NOAA does cancel service for GeoEye, the news media can contest it as a First Amendment issue, Brender said, because space is non-sovereign. This prohibits “shutter control” by the government, he said.
Another driving factor for the government to allow services is that many other countries have satellites that capture images, which the U.S. government cannot control, so GeoEye might as well stay competitive in the market, Brender said.
“Our government has been extremely rational, transparent and thoughtful in regulating our industry,” Brender said.
Capturing Obama’s Inauguration
While GeoEye cannot change the orbit of its satellites once they are moving, the company’s operators can shift the angle of the satellites up to 60 degrees.
On Jan. 20, 2009, GeoEye-1 was over West Virginia, 198 miles west of Washington, D.C. The operators shifted the satellite 60 degrees and focused on the District. The satellite was able to capture an image of the National Mall and its monuments about 40 minutes before President Obama took the Oath of Office (the satellite could not get the image of the exact time of the Oath).
The New York Times and other media organizations used the aerial shot of the Mall to estimate the number of people in the crowds watching the inauguration. An estimated 1.8 million people gathered along the Mall, grounds of the U.S. Capitol and parade route for the inauguration—a record for D.C., according to the National Park Service.
Google Earth, GeoEye and the Ft. Hood Shootings
When Nidal Malik Hasan began shooting at the military base in Fort Hood, Texas, on Nov. 5, many technologically savvy people pulled up the Google Earth image of the base to track the shooter’s movements. The only problem was that Google Earth’s images of Fort Hood were about five years old and did not include some of the new buildings on the base. Had Google Earth already updated its images with ones from GeoEye’s archive, the Web site’s visitors would have had a more accurate portrayal of the military base.
“Google Earth wants to be as current as possible, but it’s a big Earth,” Brender said.
Other Uses of GeoEye’s Imagery
The London Times used two images of Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa, from GeoEye’s archives, one in 2001 and one in 2009, to be able to document evidence of global warming.
GeoEye only provides the images, not the analysis, Brender clarified.
After review of the company’s archive of images, GeoEye was able to locate an underground nuclear facility in Iran in September 2009. It could identify the location of the facility with nothing there in February 2000, then track the construction of the facility, and Iran’s progress in covering the facility with sand. Looking at the most recent shots of the area, one would hardly be able to tell a nuclear facility was located just below the ground.
“Nobody knew where it was, or what it looked like. But we were able to bring that to the media,” Brender said, making the company’s services an important tool for journalists.
GeoEye Foundation
The GeoEye Foundation provides imagery to students and non-governmental organizations, free of cost, if they need the imagery for research they are conducting.
Since March 2007, the Foundation has provided 90 imagery grants, covering 85,000 square kilometers of imagery. Foundation awardees have spanned a variety of academic backgrounds, including archaeology, human rights, climate change, forestry, geospatial intelligence and land cover assessments.
The Foundation also provides two $5,000 scholarships a year, one of which goes to a student at George Mason University every year, “because they’re in the ‘hood,” Brender said. The other school receiving the scholarships is the University of Missouri, near the site of one of GeoEye’s ground stations.
The only criteria to qualify for this scholarship is to have a “passion for mapping.”
To learn more about the GeoEye Foundation, visit: http://www.geoeye.com/CorpSite/corporate/foundation.
Still Growing
GeoEye has continued to see steady growth since 2004, when it had 106 employees. Today, the company has 534 employees, about 65 percent of whom have clearances from the U.S. government of varying degrees.
Despite the dismal economy around the country, GeoEye is still hiring. In fact, the company has 22 open positions that it has been unable to fill.
Delloitte named said that GeoEye is one of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the country.
Mark Brender
Mark Brender, GeoEye’s vice president of communications, has been in the satellite imagery industry for about 10 years.
Before that, he was a national security producer for ABC News. In that position, he formed a satellite imagery task force, putting satellite imagery on the map for media organizations to use before it became a common idea.
While working with the task force, he lobbied Congress and the White House to ensure a favorable regulatory environment for when satellite imagery moved from intelligence to commerce.
“I knew what industry I wanted to work in next -- before it existed. I helped create the industry I wanted to work in,” Brender said. “Now that’s getting a job the hard way,” he joked.
GeoEye-1
Sept. 6, 2008
0.41-km resolution
OrbView2
August 1997
1-km resolution
IKONOS
September 1999
0.82-km resolution
GeoEye-2
Coming between 2012-2013
0.25-0.35-km resolution
GeoEye’s Ground Stations
Dulles, Va. (Headquarters)
Thornton, Colo.
St. Louis, Mo.
Barrow, Alaska
Tromso, Norway
Troll, Antarctica
To learn more, visit: http://www.geoeye.com.
Typo at foot of article - resolution in metres, not km...