The third in DigitalGlobe’s constellation of commercial remote sensing satellites, WorldView-2’s advanced agility and high orbit will expand DigitalGlobe’s image collection capabilities to nearly two million square kilometers per day, and enable faster collection of the world’s geography with multiple daily revisits to a single location. WorldView-2 will collect an unmatched eight bands of multi-spectral imagery at 1.8 meter resolution for the truest depiction of the earth’s natural color, in addition to collecting 46-centimeter resolution panchromatic imagery. The satellite is scheduled to launch in the third quarter of 2009.
System level testing of the WorldView-2 satellite began in January 2009 and will continue until the satellite is shipped to Vandenberg AFB in California for launch. The environmental tests will confirm the design integrity of the spacecraft and will include thermal vacuum, electromagnetic compatibility, electromagnetic interference, vibration, shock and acoustic testing. The Ball Aerospace BCP 5000 spacecraft, used for WorldView-1 and Worldview-2, is designed to handle nexgen optical and synthetic aperture radar remote sensing payloads and is currently meeting or exceeding all performance specifications on the operational WorldView-1 satellite. The high-performance BCP 5000 has a design life of more than seven years, and provides a platform with increased power, agility, flexibility, transmission capability and data storage.