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Earthstar Geographics LLC announced the release of their new TerraColor NextGen Landsat 8 satellite image mosaic covering Western Europe. The product is a seamless mosaic of pan-sharpened true color Landsat 8 satellite images from the 2013-2015 time frame that have been carefully processed to provide high quality color and contrast with minimal cloud cover. Coverage of all European Union states and several neighboring countries is provided.

“We are pleased to add the Western Europe coverage to our TerraColor NextGen product line to provide an up-to-date medium resolution base map of this important area,” said Eric Augenstein of Earthstar Geographics. “It provides a consistent, regional satellite view in true color for a wide variety of mapping applications and makes a perfect complement to high resolution imagery.” TerraColor NextGen products can be purchased by individual country, or regions for areas where adjacent countries have been produced (such as Europe and the Middle East). They are provided at 15-meter spatial resolution and are suitable for mapping at scales of 1:60,000 and higher.

About Earthstar Geographics LLC

Earthstar Geographics LLC specializes in products and services for the geospatial data industries with over 30 years of experience in satellite remote sensing and image processing. For complete information on the TerraColor imagery, visit the TerraColor website at www.terracolor.net

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The global market for remote sensing products reached $8.4 billion in 2015. This market should reach nearly $8.9 billion in 2016 and $13.8 billion by 2021, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.3% over the five-year period from 2016 to 2021.

This report provides:

  • An overview of the global market for remote sensing technologies, including major remote sensing platforms, key remote sensing instruments, and applications accounting for the bulk of the industry
  • Analyses of global market trends, with data from 2015, estimates for 2016, and projections of compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) through 2021
  • Estimates of demand for remote sensing products by region, instrument by application, and platform by application
  • An explanation of remote sensing image analysis techniques
  • Reviews of remote sensing patents, including patent abstracts and the names of the inventors and original patent assignees
  • Identification of the major organizations that form and support the global remote sensing community
  • Profiles of major players

Source: BCC Research
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The launch of the GOES-R geostationary satellite in October 2016 could herald a new era for predicting hurricanes, according to Penn State researchers. The wealth of information from this new satellite, at time and space scales not previously possible, combined with advanced statistical hurricane prediction models, could enable more accurate predictions in the future.


“For decades, geostationary satellites such as the GOES series have been the primary tool to monitor severe weather like storms and hurricanes in real time,” said Fuqing Zhang, professor of meteorology and director of Penn State’s Center for Advanced Data Assimilation and Predictability Techniques.

“They have helped people see what’s going on in the present, but, until now, we as a community have not been able to tap into these resources to guide us to predict future severe weather.”

Geostationary satellites like the GOES series orbit the Earth at a fixed location, taking snapshots of cloud formations and other meteorological information. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration operates GOES with contributions from NASA.

Historically, two main challenges exist when using satellite data for hurricane predictions – the type and amount of data collected. Satellites do not directly measure many quantities related to a hurricane’s intensity, such as surface pressure, wind speeds, temperature and water vapor beneath the cloudy regions of the hurricane eyewall.

They do, however, collect data known as brightness temperature, which show how much radiation is emitted by objects on Earth and in the atmosphere at different infrared frequencies. Because all objects naturally emit and absorb different amounts of radiation at different frequencies, the complexity of data poses challenges to researchers hoping to use these data for hurricane prediction models.

“At some frequencies water vapor absorbs moderate amounts of radiation passing through it, at other frequencies it absorbs most of that radiation and at other frequencies it absorbs hardly any at all.

Unlike water vapor, clouds strongly absorb radiation at all of these frequencies,” said Eugene Clothiaux, professor of meteorology. “Comparing measurements at different frequencies leads to information about water vapor and clouds at different altitudes above the Earth. This begins to tell us about the physical structure of water vapor fields and clouds, including those in the area around a hurricane.”

Using brightness temperature satellite data to improve model forecasts of hurricanes is not straightforward. Brightness temperature information is a complex mixture related to the ground, atmospheric water vapor and clouds. The team had to develop a sophisticated analysis and modeling scheme to extract information in useful ways for model forecasts.

Zhang, Masashi Minamide, graduate student in meteorology, and Clothiaux demonstrated in a pilot study that it is becoming feasible to use brightness data. They found definitive correlations between measurements of brightness temperature and information about the storm – wind speed and sea level pressure underneath the hurricane. They report their results in the current issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

Using data from GOES-13, the team completed a proof-of-concept experiment, analyzing data from Hurricane Karl in 2010. They used the Penn State real-time hurricane analysis and prediction system that Zhang and his team have been developing and refining for nearly a decade.

“Hurricane prediction models work by chunking individual blocks of the hurricane and this starts from the initial information that is fed into the model,” said Zhang.

“We then run an ensemble of possible outcomes for the hurricane using different variables to estimate uncertainty and this tells us how the hurricane might behave. If we are able to use a higher resolution for the initial state, this could allow us to vastly improve hurricane predictions in the future.”

GOES-13 provides data at a resolution of 2.5 miles, and GOES-R will increase that to under 0.6 miles for some frequencies of brightness temperature. The increase in resolution is especially important because of the size of hurricanes.

The eyewall, the layer of clouds surrounding the eye, varies in size but is roughly 6 miles thick. Using GOES-13 brightness temperatures with 2.5-mile resolution, the eyewall is often grouped together with other parts of the storm, with only one or two brightness temperature measurements from only the eyewall itself.

A 0.6 mile resolution brightness temperature measurement would allow for up to 10 eyewall measurements to be fed into prediction models as separate chunks of information instead of grouped together with other parts of the storm.

This new data source could have implications on the longstanding challenge of predicting hurricane intensity, Zhang said. Researchers know that wind speed and other levels of activity near the eye of the hurricane are linked to future intensity, but actually collecting these data is difficult.

Today, NOAA uses airborne reconnaissance to collect data, but this is only possible when the storm is within flying distance. Satellites that constantly monitor the oceans at high spatial and temporal resolution and with many frequencies of brightness temperature, like GOES-R, could remove that constraint.

“Geostationary satellites are there all the time, which makes them ideal for capturing the initial and evolving states of hurricanes, including the crucial information in the cloudy region of the storm,” said Zhang. “Using satellite data more effectively could potentially revolutionize hurricane monitoring and prediction for many years.”

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[Via Satellite 03-17-2016] Small satellite startup Satellogic is on its way to building and orbiting a constellation of 300 Earth Observation (EO) satellites to provide near-real time imagery of the Earth, with the first non-prototype launches slated to occur this year. Having already launched three prototype satellites between 2013 and 2014, Satellogic opened a manufacturing facility in Montevideo, Uruguay last year with the potential to build several dozen satellites per year — something the company feels is necessary to support a constellation of this size.

Emiliano Kargieman, founder and CEO of Satellogic, told Via Satellite that the factory has a 10,000 square foot clean room, able to produce the SmallSats in large quantities. Satellogic chose the location because of its close proximity to the company’s largest Research and Development (R&D) facility in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Each spacecraft in the constellation is to have an approximate weight of 35 kilograms, and will perform one-meter multispectral imaging. With multiple pilot programs already underway with prospective customers, Satellogic is eager to get its fleet in orbit. Kargieman said the factory will be dedicated exclusively to producing the company’s own spacecraft

“The factory is dimensioned to allow us to build in excess of 50 of our satellites per year, so we expect to keep it busy over the next few years as we grow our constellation,” he said.

Satellogic originally planned to begin launching its satellites in 2015, so that a service constellation of 16 spacecraft would be active this year, but launch delays have stretched out this timeline. Kargieman said the company now plans to have an initial constellation of six satellites by year’s end, with two launching May 30 on a Long March 4B from China, and another four later on aboard a Russian Dnepr rocket.

“It’s a tough market for launch. The one we are doing in May was originally scheduled for December 2015. In a similar way Dnepr launches for their own political reasons were delayed,” explained Kargieman. “We still expect to complete the constellation of 16 satellites. It will be later than we originally planned; it will be in the first two quarters of 2017.”

SmallSats, due to their lower commercial launching value, are frequently relegated to the role of secondary payloads, paying deference to larger spacecraft that dictate missions. Kargieman said Satellogic is pursuing launch opportunities for another 19 SmallSats in 2017, after the original six, in hopes that launch will not continue to be an obstacle.

“Other opportunities to launch satellites that we are considering would potentially put us in a position to grow our constellation further than that up to 25 satellites during the year. Of course, that all is pending on launches going according to plan. If we have to judge by previous history, then it’s reasonable to expect a few delays,” he said.

In the wake of the recent SmallSat boom, a groundswell of new launch companies offering dedicated services tailored for this market has emerged. Kargieman said Satellogic is closely following these new entrants. Among the new players, Rocket Lab’s Electron launch vehicle and Virgin Galactic’s LauncherOne rocket are currently scheduled for maiden flights in 2017. Both won CubeSat launch contracts from NASA last year along with Firefly Space Systems, whose Firefly Alpha vehicle is scheduled for suborbital flight in 2017, followed by orbital missions in 2018. Kargieman expressed interest in new players offering these types of services, and said Satellogic is “talking to all of them.”

“We really hope to see more availability in launch; particularly not only more availability, but faster turnarounds and shorter cycles to get our satellites in orbit,” he said. “We are also expecting — and this is the part where the promise still needs to pay off — that this will translate into more reasonable costs for launching into orbit. So far, from the small launchers, we have seen really good value propositions in terms of responsiveness, but not necessarily very competitive pricing. We expect the competition will drive prices down to bring not only more responsive, but also more competitive launch opportunities in the next few years.”

Kargieman said it will take several years to complete the constellation of 300 SmallSats, but that this is the requisite number for Satellogic to achieve the imaging rate it desires.

“A constellation of 300 satellites would allow us to average revisit times of around 5 minutes anywhere on the planet for one meter resolution multi-spectral imaging,” he said.

The first constellation would have a revisit rate starting around 2 hours for anywhere on Earth, he said.

Regarding other constellation prep, Kargieman said Satellogic is building a network of ground stations to support the large stream of data its satellites intend to produce. He said the company will use a combination of its own ground stations and third party stations to tap into a network of more than 20 around the world. Satellogic has two of its own stations operational today, and plans to complete another two before the end of the year. Kargieman said the company is also working on downstream analytics platforms for customers to access data without having to develop their own cumbersome image processing capabilities.

Satellogic has pilot programs with end users in the energy and agriculture markets today. Kargieman said the energy studies have focused on pipeline monitoring for oil and gas, and agriculture studies on crop monitoring oriented toward precision agriculture. The company is also examining opportunities in forestry related to calculating and maintaining wood stocks, and looking at carbon capture.

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February 29, 2016, By James Carroll. Designed by Teledyne DALSA, a multispectral imaging system on board the DMC3 earth imaging satellites, is now returning images from space, in order to aid urban planning and intelligence management based on high-resolution images.

Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) launched three SSTL-300S1 satellite platforms that formed the DMC3 constellation, which provides change detection, disaster monitoring, and response planning in the form of high-resolution imagery. Specifically, the high resolution VHRI 100 imager on board the satellites was designed to provide 1 meter ground sampling distance in in panchromatic mode, and 4 meters of GSD in multispectral mode, with a swath width of 23.4km.

Teledyne DALSA created a multispectral imaging solution by placing advanced dichroic filters directly in the imaging area. The company’s multispectral solutions are “push-broom” linear and TDI sensors with linear resolution to 16000+ pixels, in either CCD or CMOS sensor formats. A single multispectral imaging device can contain multiple imaging areas tailored to different multispectral bandwidths (wavelengths).

DMC3 satellites have captured a number of high-resolution images aboard the satellites, including 1 1 meter resolution image of Athens Olympic Stadium and Sydney airport (pictured.)

“We’re pleased by the results we’re seeing from the DMC3 satellites,” commented Luis Gomes, Director of Earth Observation at SSTL. “The imager performance on all three space crafts has surpassed our expectations and the performance of the sensors has been outstanding. The Teledyne DALSA team not only met our critical technical requirements, they have delivered well beyond them.”

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by Peter B. de Selding — March 31, 2016. PARIS — Geospatial imaging services provider UrtheCast Corp. of Canada on March 30 gave investors an in-depth look at the company’s strategy, including a new eight-satellite constellation addition to the 16-satellite system announced in 2015.

UrtheCast declined to say when its OptiSAR constellation of eight optical and eight two-band radar satellites would be built, insisting that the company would not seek funding from the capital markets but would wait for prospective customers to commit the needed resources.

The same is true for the newly disclosed UrtheDaily constellation of eight medium-resolution optical satellites. To be built by the same Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd.-based team that will build OptiSAR, UrtheDaily will not happen without firm customer commitments, the company said.

“The trigger is when we’ve signed up enough customers whose contractual demand is enough for us to finance against it,” UrtheCast Chief Executive Wade Larson said, adding that the company’s business model borrows more from established geospatial imagery provider DigitalGlobe of Westminster, Colorado, than from Google’s Skybox Imaging, recently renamed Terra Bella, of Mountain View, California.

UrtheCast, following its July 2015 purchase of Deimos Imaging of Spain, operates four optical sensors. The medium-resolution Deimos-1 satellite and a medium-resolution Theia camera mounted on the Russian side of the international space station offer wide-area coverage.

The high-resolution Deimos-2 satellite provides sharper imagery but of smaller areas and for sales purposes is often bundled with UrtheCast’s high-resolution Iris video camera, also on board the space station.

Iris faced multiple delays because of a defective installation and reached full operating capability only this year. Even so, its appeal to defense and intelligence-agency customers is not what was expected, in part because of the installation issues. UrtheCast early this year received the final payment on its Iris-related insurance claim.

“We had to do a lot of engineering to fix the vibration and friction issues” after the initial Iris installation, Larson said. “In the end, we were able to produce a really good product in spite of that. It’s not absolutely at the exact specifications” of its designed performance.

UrtheCast’s cloud-based Web platform, considered perhaps its biggest product differentiator in a market growing thick with commercial Earth observation businesses, is now merging imagery from the two Deimos satellites and the medium-resolution Theia camera.

UrtheCast reported revenue of 41.1 million Canadian dollars for the 12 months ending Dec. 31, up from 11.9 million Canadian dollars in 2014, with an EBITDA – earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization – loss of 12.9 million Canadian dollars.

The company did not disclose how much revenue came from the six months of Deimos ownership in 2015. Deimos had expected to generate $40 million in revenue for the year.

For 2016, UrtheCast said revenue should rise to about 57.5 million Canadian dollars, with an adjusted EBITDA of 5.2 million Canadian dollars.

With the two Deimos satellites and the two station-mounted cameras now in service, 2016 might have been considered as UrtheCast’s first year at cruising altitude for its business. But as it suggested in 2015 with the announcement of OptiSAR, UrtheCast’s ambitions are growing as fast as it expects the Earth observation business to grow.

The company reported 250 employees as of last Dec. 31, up from 100 a year earlier. Eighty of the new hires came with the Deimos acquisition.

UrtheCast announced in 2015 that it had signed memoranda of understanding with two prospective OptiSAR customers valued at $370 million. The company announced no new deals on March 30 but said it is in active discussions with multiple leads.

One of the customers that signed the MoU also has financed the majority of the 100 million Canadian dollars ($72 million) in research and development that UrtheCast has devoted to refining the OptiSAR system.

“If they’ve invested that much money, they’re probably likely to buy the capacity that comes out of this,” said Jeff Rath, UrtheCast’s executive vice president for strategy and corporate finance.

Larson said the OptiSAR constellation would be deployed in two orbital planes, with eight satellites in polar sun-synchronous orbit and the other eight in a medium-inclination orbit at an angle of between 20 and 45 degrees relative the equator.

The synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) satellites, each weighing 1,400 kilograms at launch, would carry two sensors, one in lower-resolution L-band, and one in higher-resolution X-band. They will also be equipped with Automatic Identification System (AIS) sensors for maritime sip tracking.

The optical satellites, weighing 670 kilograms at launch, would carry two focal planes, one with a ground resolution of 50 centimeters operating in push-broom mode, and the other carrying a 30-frames-per-second video.

Larson said the video camera could produce videos with a 40-centimeter ground resolution. In still-photography mode, the camera could produce 25-centimeter-resolution pictures.

OptiSAR’s general outlines were disclosed in mid-2015. In their March 30 presentations, company officials said the customers they have surveyed want still more. UrtheCast’s answer is UrtheDaily.

Apparently using the same satellite manufacturing team, the eight-satellite UrtheDaily constellation would carry 5-meter-resolution optical sensors in polar orbit to image 145 million square kilometers a day to monitor global change – human and natural.

OptiSAR’s focus is on rapidly revisiting a given area of interest to customers. UrtheDaily is focused on broad-area coverage, a market that does not require high-resolution imagery.

UrtheCast declined to estimate how much OptiSAR and UrtheDaily would cost. It said the two constellations’ synergies on the satellite platform, payload and operations side would minimize cost.

The business model, Larson said, hews more closely to traditional Earth observation systems now in orbit such as DigitalGlobe than it is to recent Silicon Valley startups.

“Earth observation is entirely a sugar daddy-funded business,” Larson said of the sector’s history. “Look at the major players in the United States, Canada and Europe. They’ve found some major anchor customer – call it a sugar daddy – who substantially funds the system in one of two ways: They put money up front and you use that in the build phase, or they give you a promissory note – a guarantee to pay you for data – and you take that promissory note and you finance against it.

“There is a new model, which has emerged in Silicon Valley, where you go find obscenely rich venture capitalists, convince them to give you hundreds of millions of dollars and then you build satellites on spec and you launch them.

“We are not following that model. We’ve simply innovated a little bit on the sugar daddy model. We don’t have one big sugar daddy, we federate lots of little sugar daddies around the world. We get them to buy in on a time-share basis. Once you’ve got enough of them with an aggregate financeable buy-in from them, you go and raise capital.”

Larson said he would not speculate on when the company would receive sufficient commitments to build the OptiSAR and UrtheDaily systems. “It’s not years, but it’s not days either,” he said.

He said OptiSAR would take 3.5 years to build once construction started.

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Commercial UAV Expo today announced the release of their most recent report, titled “Surveying and Mapping with UAVs.” This free report provides information on the use of UAS technology for surveying and mapping, including key insights into how UAVs are being used today and how they will be utilized in the near future.

The complete report is available for download here

In this report, Commercial UAV News Executive Editor Jeremiah Karpowicz covers topics including: the short and long term effects of FAA implications, the increasing return on investment for utilizing drones due to the lowered costs of UAV technology, and how the industry will be impacted once operators are able to fly beyond visual line-of-sight (BLOS).

Karpowicz spoke with various industry leaders including Lewis Graham, President and Chief Technical Officer of GeoCue Corporation, Jeff Lovin, Senior Vice President and Director of Government Solutions at Woolpert, and Eric Andelin, President and CTO of Vertical Information Services, Inc. (VERTX) to discuss how UAVs are reshaping the way in which surveying and mapping professionals operate.

The free report is available for download here

About Commercial UAV Expo

Commercial UAV Expo is a conference and exhibition exclusively focused on the commercial drone market covering industries including Surveying & Mapping; Civil Infrastructure; Aggregates & Mining; Construction; Process, Power & Utilities; Precision Agriculture; Law Enforcement, Emergency Response and Search & Rescue (SAR). Commercial UAV Expo will take place October 31-November 2, 2016 at MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Commercial UAV Expo is organized by Diversified Communications, a leading organizer of conferences and trade shows with 15 years in the geospatial arena, including SPAR 3D Expo & Conference and International LiDAR Mapping Forum.

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MARKHAM, Ontario, Canada – March 30, 2016: PCI Geomatics, a world leading developer of remote sensing and photogrammetric software and systems, announced today the release of its Geomatica 2016 – the latest version of the company’s complete and integrated desktop, geo-image processing software featuring tools for remote sensing, digital photogrammetry, geospatial analysis, mosaicking and more.

Geomatica 2016 improves accuracy and speed for key geo-image processing steps, including aerotriangulation and bundle adjustment, automatic contrast control and mosaic touch-up. This new version also provides enhanced support for airborne scanners, SAR data handling and compact polarimetric tools.

“We’ve designed this release around the concepts of sensor support and overall workflow with the goal of making Geomatica more accurate and more flexible for different customers” said David Piekny, Product Marketing Manager at PCI Geomatics “We see a lot of diversity in how our customers use Geomatica. In Geomatica 2016 we’re able to work with even more types of geospatial data through specific additions to the software, but at the same time have improved on widely-used tasks like tie-point collection, DEM extraction and automatic color balancing.”

Geomatica 2016 is available for 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows (7, 8.x, 10) and CentOS/RHEL Linux (7.x) starting today. For more information on Geomatica 2016, please visit www.pcigeomatics.com/geomatica.

About PCI Geomatics

PCI Geomatics is a world-leading developer of software and systems for remote sensing, geo-image processing, and photogrammetry. With more than 30 years of experience in the geospatial industry, PCI is recognized globally for its excellence in providing software for accurately and rapidly processing satellite and aerial imagery. There are more than 30,000 PCI licenses, in over 150 countries worldwide.

Find out more about PCI Geomatics at www.pcigeomatics.com.

A new NASA airborne field experiment planned for this summer will make key airborne measurements of clouds and smoke particles over the southeastern Atlantic Ocean to help scientists understand a major challenge to our understanding of climate science.

One of the primary goals of NASA’s ObseRvations of CLouds above Aerosols and their intEractionS (ORACLES) campaign is to understand the extent to which clouds and the smoke interact and the degree to which smoke particles serve as nuclei for cloud droplets. To address these issues, a research aircraft will make measurements of smoke and cloud layers.

In combination with extensive satellite mapping of smoke and clouds, ORACLES aircraft flights will allow scientists to gather the information needed to understand whether smoke from African fires is changing the way in which marine stratus clouds off the west coast of Africa cool the Earth.

This remote area is home to one of the largest layers of low clouds on Earth. These clouds reflect a large fraction of the incoming sunlight back to space and act as natural “reflectors” that help keep the planet cool. In these clouds, water droplets, each roughly 1/10th of the thickness of a human hair, form by condensation of water vapor onto even smaller particles called cloud condensation nuclei (CCNs).

Both natural and human sources of these nuclei can be important globally affecting the properties of clouds. Recent studies have shown how a lack of CCNs can make it difficult to form the bright clouds that reflect sunlight. Owing to the large distance from major aerosol sources, the remote southern Atlantic can be relatively starved of natural CCN sources.

NASA satellites, most notably the spaceborne CALIPSO lidar and other instruments in the A-Train constellation, have been observing a possible major additional source of cloud nuclei for a decade. This source of nuclei might extend the lifetime of Atlantic cloud decks.

Extensive regional burning of biomass – organic matter derived from recently living vegetation – due to both natural processes and human activities occurs in southern Africa during the dry season from July to October. This burning is responsible for approximately 30 percent of global biomass burning emissions, and produces extensive layers of smoke containing large numbers of cloud condensation nuclei transported by prevailing winds over the southern Atlantic west of Africa.

Smoke particles may also cause clouds to be brighter (i.e., more reflective). However, according to CALIPSO satellite lidar data (see figure), the smoke layers mainly reside above the clouds and may not actually get into the clouds to serve as CCNs. CALIPSO lidar data provide a tantalizing indication that smoke can reach down into the cloud decks at times. In addition, the smoke can obscure the clouds below, making it difficult to tell whether the clouds contain more droplets as the smoke descends into the cloud deck.

Data collected during the ORACLES campaign will begin to answer fundamental questions regarding the cooling effect of clouds on our planet and how that process may be affected by pollution and smoke from African fires in the southeast Atlantic Ocean region.

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[Via Satellite 03-25-2016] DigitalGlobe has reached an agreement with an existing international defense and intelligence customer to convert an existing letter of intent into a definitive agreement. The new agreement extends the customer’s contract by four years and adds direct access to the WorldView 3 Earth observation satellite.

DigitalGlobe included this agreement in the company’s previously announced $38 million of incremental annual revenue starting in 2017 from contracts and letters of intent with international defense and intelligence customers. Total commitments from these customers for capacity on WorldView 3 and WorldView 4 stands at $335 million; the percentage under firm contract has increased from 60 percent to approximately 70 percent.

WorldView 3 launched in August 2014 aboard an Atlas 5 rocket from Lockheed Martin Commercial Launch Services. WorldView 4 is scheduled to launch in September this year.

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