DigitalGlobe and European Space Imaging Cooperation Rewarding

DigitalGlobe, USA, and its partner European Space Imaging, Germany, have published their results of the 2011 Control with Remote Sensing (CwRS) Campaign. The CwRS Campaign supports the member states in the implementation of the European Union's (EU) Common Agricultural Policy. The DigitalGlobe constellation outperformed competitors by a wide margin, with DigitalGlobe satellites collecting imagery approximately two times faster than its nearest rival.

This enabled DigitalGlobe and its partner European Space Imaging to provide 66 percent of the total EU member states' requirement for very high-resolution imagery, including the most imagery with cloud cover equal to or less than five percent of the image.

DigitalGlobe's constellation is comprised of its QuickBird, WorldView-1 and WorldView-2 satellites. WorldView-1 and -2 are the most advanced commercial imagery satellites currently on-orbit. Both use Control Moment Gyros (CMG), giving them far better agility and manoeuvring speed than competing satellites.

As the satellites travel at roughly 27,000 kilometres per hour through their orbits, the CMGs are responsible for quickly adjusting the angle of the satellites, allowing them to photograph a wide range of locations on the planet's surface.

Subsequently, the satellites are able to capture more imagery and faster than would otherwise be possible. DigitalGlobe has also passed the milestone of obtaining more than one billion square kilometres (km2) of colour imagery, 60 percent of which is less than two years old.

European Space Imaging, which has been a data provider to the CwRS Campaign since very high-resolution sensors were introduced, manages and operates the image collection campaign using its own local satellite ground station. For the 2011 campaign, European Space Imaging was the only supplier to complete the program with a reliable 100 percent success rate.

The technical management of the CwRS Campaign is performed by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission on behalf of the Directorate General for Agriculture and Rural Development. The campaign has been in operation for twenty years. With the successful introduction of very high-resolution sensors in 2004, hundreds of thousands of km² of agricultural land are monitored throughout Europe with strict technical criteria and constraints.