In late November I had the opportunity to attend the product launch for the GeoEye-1 Earth Imaging satellite

The GeoEye-1 satellite was launched on Sept 6th 2008 and is capable of delivering sub 0.5m imagery. The key things we took out of the seminar were:

• Imagery is expected to be available for commercial release in January 2009
• Possibility of lower prices (especially for lower resolution imagery) as GeoEye-1 and the existing IKONOS satellite can both be used making capture more efficient
• Work has already started on GeoEye-2 and it is expected to be able to deliver 0.25m imagery (subject to US government restrictions)

Some sample images can be found on the GeoEye-1 website here or here and all the technical specifications are available here

Update 06/02/09 – GeoEye-1 imagery is now commercially available in Australia