The IKONOS commercial remote sensing satellite, designed and built by Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT], has achieved its ninth year of on-orbit service and continues to provide high-resolution imagery of the Earth to commercial and government customers around the world. IKONOS is owned and operated by GeoEye [NASDAQ: GEOY] of Dulles, Virginia. The world's first commercial high-resolution imaging system was launched September 24th, 1999, with an anticipated life expectancy of five-to-seven years. In 2007, Lockheed Martin performed a life expectancy analysis for GeoEye and determined the spacecraft may continue to be fully operational into the next decade. The spacecraft collects 0.82-meter resolution black-and-white imagery, while simultaneously collecting just better than four-meter resolution multispectral data. These map-accurate images are used for applications in land management, environmental monitoring, local and regional government, national security, disaster relief, news gathering, and many other geospatial applications. IKONOS has collected the world's largest archive of commercial, high-resolution Earth imagery.