As our five satellites continue to orbit the globe capturing images of our ever-changing planet, we occasionally take pause to appreciate where we are and what we have accomplished. In June we achieved an important milestone at DigitalGlobe; our archive just surpassed 4 billion km2 of imagery.
When I think back on my early days at DigitalGlobe (then WorldView Imaging Corp), when it was little more than a business plan, I am amazed to think how far we have come. To put 4,000,000,000 km2 of coverage into perspective, our archive now contains enough imagery to cover the globe’s landmass 27 times over!
In this imagery archive is practically every building, every car, every ship, every port, every house, every glacier, every mountain, hill and river on the Earth; it is as if we have a time machine with which to view our rapidly changing planet.of imagery
The progression of imaging of our earth. Clockwise from top left: (a) Pale Blue Dot – taken from the edge of our solar system by the Voyager spacecraft, (b) The Blue Marble – taken by the Apollo 17 crew, and (c) a DigitalGlobe WorldView-2 image of the Golden Gate Bridge.
With our current five satellite constellation, we are adding a billion km2 every year to our imagery archive, an area we expect to increase even further with the launch of WorldView-3 next year. I look forward to seeing what the next 4 billion will bring, though this time it will take a lot less than 21 years!
Source: DigitalGlobe News
