IKONOS Data

On September 24, 1999 the first commercial submeter resolution IKONOS satellite was successfully launched from the Vanderberg (California) air force base. Space Imaging company (GeoEye, following the merge with OrbImage in January 2006) initiated the use of extra high resolution imagery for civil purposes.

IKONOS satellite is still fully functional staying on orbit for 8 years already. As of today the imagery of the total area of 275 million square km were received. All the acquired images are basically with no clouds (the cloud cover does not exceed 20% of the total image area). IKONOS delivers 0.8 m pan and 3.2 m multispectral data (4 bands, similar to Landsat 4&5 TM in spectral characteristics). It is possible to get end-products based on IKONOS data in the following band combination: black-and-white, “natural colors” (red, green, blue channels), “pseudo-colors” (near infra-red, red, green channels) or all the four bands.

In June 2007, ScanEx R&D Center became the official distributor of IKONOS extra-high resolution data. We accept requests both for images from archives and for operational imagery. Also ScanEx offers to use IKONOS extra-high resolution imagery to create and support regional, municipal, interdepartmental and other geo-portals. Vivid examples of using such data are «Яндекс. Карты» project and the first Russian geo-portal kosmosnimki.ru.