The Space Imaging IKONOS satellite is the world's first commercial 1-meter remote sensing satellite. (IKONOS (icon) means "image" in Greek.) The IKONOS satellite system was built by Lockheed Martin Commercial Space Systems (Sunnyvale, CA) and was launched in 1999. The communications and image processing elements were built by Raytheon Company (Garland, TX). The camera was built by Eastman Kodak (Rochester, NY).

This high-quality data may be purchased from Space Imaging at graduated prices based on degree of orthorectification and other image qualtiy characteristics. The resolution of the panchromatic data enables users to distinguish ground features as small as one meter. Objects this small can be distinguished, provided the objects are well removed from other objects and have separate and distinct visual characteristics. One-meter imagery cannot "see" individual people.

However, careful timing of the remote sensing with respect to the sun's position can greatly enhance the ability of one-meter imaging to distinguish such small objects. The images in the preceding Afghanistan section were taken under lighting conditions whereby the targets throw highly distinct shadows. You are actually looking at the shadows of the soldiers marching in the image shown on this page, not the soldiers themselves. (In the old days, before high-resolution satellite imagery, satellites could be "spoofed" into seeing objects that were not really there using techniques such as painting shadows of aircraft on runways, etc.)

IKONOS raises many interesting questions for the mapping community. How did one-meter satellite imaging technology developed by the government for classified intelligence-gathering purposes find its way into the hands of a commercial company? Does this mean that other once-restricted GIS related data and technology will become available to the mapping public? I have not been able to determine if IKONOS is capable of generating stereo pairs suitable for the production of DEMs. (Editor's note, November 2003 - it can.) However even if not, can this capability be far behind? And will this prompt the United States Government to release more of its database of high-quality international DEM data?

One thing is for sure, with the advent of military action in Afghanistan as of 1230 hours EDST on October 7 2002, expect to see a lot more IKONOS images in the news. Additional information about IKONOS, as well as more images is available from the Space Imaging website.

(Editor's note: Not one of my most accurate predictions. As many of you may remember, the distribution of IKONOS imagery was subsequently supressed during the Afghanistan war when the United States government bought up all of the IKONOS overflight capacity for the duration. The howls of protest from the news media, government and industry double-talking and related controversy resulted in a very slight relaxation of this policy during the recent Iraq war (see my War Images of Baghdad article written during the period of active hostilities). However, this was a public relations initiative, not a change in government policy in this regard as the release of all images was strictly controlled by agencies of the US government. (Note that all the images show direct hits on the targets. No images showing misses were released to the public as far as I know.) It can be assumned that this control extended to remotely sensed images acquired by other governments by mutual agreement, as essentially no imagery became available during the fighting.)

Satellite image: www.spaceimaging.com