QuickBird

Article summary

QuickBird was a high-resolution commercial Earth observation satellite, owned by DigitalGlobe, launched in 2001 and reentered after orbit decay in 2015. QuickBird used Ball Aerospace's Global Imaging System 2000 (BGIS 2000). The satellite collected panchromatic (black and white) imagery at 61 centimeter resolution and multispectral imagery at 2.44- (at 450 km) to 1.63-meter (at 300 km) resolution, as orbit altitude is lowered during the end of mission life. At this resolution, detail such as buildings and other infrastructure are easily visible. However, this resolution is insufficient for working with smaller objects such as a license plate on a car. The imagery can be imported into remote sensing image processing software, as well as into GIS packages for analysis. Contractors included Ball Aerospace & Technologies, Kodak and Fokker Space. Original plans called for a constellation of three QuickBird satellites scheduled to be in orbit by 2008. In the end, two QuickBird satellites, QuickBird I and II, made it to launch pad. However, only QuickBird II made it successfully into orbit (QuickBird I suffered launch failure). Thus QuickBird II satellite is usually referred to simply as QuickBird, and by the name QuickBird is usually meant the satellite QuickBird II.…

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