Satellite Map Information

Landsat satellites have been collecting images of the Earth's surface for more than thirty years. NASA launched the first Landsat satellite in 1972, and the most recent one, Landsat 7, in 1999. Instruments onboard the satellites have acquired millions of images of the Earth. These images provide a unique resource for people who work in agriculture, geology, forestry, regional planning, education, mapping, and global change research. The USGS has used the Landsat 7 imagery to display each of the states in the U.S.

Recent advances in computer technology, satellite imagery and the ability to transmit and display vast amounts of digital data have brought the world of satellite maps and imagery to all of us. You can use products like Flashearth, Google Earth, Mapquest and MSN virtual earth to zoom right in and look at a satellite image of your house!

DigitalGlobe is the leader in the global commercial Earth imagery and geospatial information market. The company’s technical superiority and innovation, unparalleled commitment to customer service, extensive business partner network and open systems philosophy make DigitalGlobe the preferred supplier of imagery products to government and commercial markets.

DigitalGlobe is the only geospatial content provider to take an end-to-end approach to geospatial imagery, from acquiring proprietary high-resolution images through a leading-edge satellite and aerial network, to integrating and distributing that data through GlobeXplorer, a web-based search and retrieval system that makes it easy to find, purchase and download global imagery.

 DigitalGlobe’s QuickBird satellite is the world’s highest resolution commercial imaging system. The company’s next-generation WorldView 1 satellite is scheduled to launch in mid-2007, and its WorldView 2 satellite is anticipated to launch in late 2008. The company’s updated and growing Image Library contains over two hundred million square kilometers of QuickBird imagery and an extensive global library of aerial imagery suited to countless mapping and planning needs.

DigitalGlobe has established a reseller community worldwide to market and sell QuickBird products. Their resellers serve as an extension of the DigitalGlobe products.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe.

Launched in 2002, Envisat is the largest Earth Observation spacecraft ever built. It carries ten sophisticated instruments (including optical and radar) to provide continuous observation and monitoring of the Earth's land, atmosphere, oceans and ice caps.  Envisat flies in a sun-synchronous polar orbit of about 800-km altitude, and circles the Earth in 100 minutes.

MERIS (Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer) is one of the 10 instruments onboard Envisat. It is a field-of-view push broom imaging spectrometer that measures the solar radiation reflected by the Earth, at a ground spatial resolution of 260 m (at nadir), in 15 spectral bands in the visible and near infra-red, within a swath of 1150 km. MERIS allows global coverage of the Earth every 3 days.

MIRAVI stands for MERIS Images RApid VIsualization and it's a data-driven system for real time image rendering and quality analysis.

Those images, though fascinating, are not suitable for scientific use. Scientists usually prefer to work with MERIS data products, which fully exploit the 15 spectral bands of the instrument, and which are generated with sophisticated algorithms.