New Geo-Spatial Satellite Service for Security Pros

New Geo-Spatial Satellite Service for Security Pros

geospatial

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A new satellite image library will supply security and defence professionals with constantly updated images at high resolution. The new One Atlas service launched by Airbus Defence and Space is claimed to be the world’s most refreshed 1.5m resolution satellite image library for defence, intelligence and security applications.

One Atlas represents a major step forward in satellite image services, providing a complete streaming service covering the entire Earth’s landmass, using high resolution, professional grade images less than twelve months old. With 18 zoom levels, a global resolution of 1.5m, rising to 50cm for the world’s major cities, and careful quality control to ensure minimal cloud and haze cover, the product’s GIS-ready, ortho-rectified imagery provides an un-paralleled basemap for military GEOINT (geo-spatiall intelligence), according to army-technology.com.

Once integrated with the user’s own data, One Atlas enables teams, assets and areas of interest to be planned, mapped and located, while the quality of the images means that distances and surfaces can be accurately measured and plotted.

One Atlas provides a single streamlined approach, which slashes all the traditional costs of selecting, processing, updating and hosting the images, while allowing them to be seamlessly integrated into user systems, and shared across teams and organisations securely.

At the heart of the system lie the satellite images acquired by the Pléiades and SPOT constellations. Pléiades are two very-high resolution satellites capable of providing 50cm product imagery.

In addition to the individual photographs themselves, the satellite images also contain a wealth of associated metadata for each image, including date, time and angle of acquisition and the amount of cloud coverage. The data is stored on the Google Cloud.

GEOINT systems have come on a long way over recent years, and online map services have now essentially become such a familiar and integrated part of everyday life at so many different levels that it is easy to get a little blasé about the whole thing. However, there is a very big chasm between the needs of online shoppers wanting to see how far away the courier service is with their next delivery, and the demands of the defence, intelligence and security community – and for that, there is One Atlas.