GeoEye Announces the Start of Commercial Operations for Its GeoEye-1 Earth-Imaging Satellite

5 February 2009

GeoEye, Inc. announced today the start of commercial operations for its new GeoEye-1 Earth-imaging satellite. The Company is also submitting imagery from the satellite to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) for their certification under the terms of the NextView contract.

"We are now selling imagery from GeoEye-1 to commercial customers around the world and to our government customers in Europe, Asia and the Middle East," said Matthew O'Connell, GeoEye's chief executive officer. "We are submitting imagery to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for certification and look forward to beginning to serve NGA under our new Service Level Agreement with them."

Bill Schuster, chief operating officer for GeoEye, said, "We established extremely exacting requirements for GeoEye-1 and meeting them proved to be very technically challenging -- particularly in the calibration phase. Additional improvements can still be made, but we have now succeeded in attaining our performance objectives. The combination of resolution, clarity, color and accuracy make it the best satellite imagery on the market. We look forward to working with NGA over the next few weeks to complete the certification process."

The NextView program is designed to ensure that the NGA has access to commercial imagery in support of its mission to provide timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of national security. GeoEye won its $500-million NextView contract in September 2004. In October 2004, GeoEye selected General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems as the GeoEye-1 prime contractor. The satellite's sensor was built by ITT Corporation.

GeoEye-1 imagery products and solutions are now commercially available in half-, one-, two- and four-meter ground resolutions. Imagery products are available in color and black & white. Color imagery comprises four bands: blue, green, red and near-infrared. There are several ways commercial customers can purchase GeoEye-1 imagery.

Additionally, customers can search for IKONOS data in the GeoEye satellite imagery archive using the company's newly released search-and-discovery tool called GeoFUSE, where "FUSE" stands for "Find, Use, Serve and Extend." GeoFUSE gives users access to a number of search-and-discovery tools, assists customers in locating available imagery which meet specific project needs and enables them to easily navigate and efficiently search.

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Source: GeoEye