Commercial satellital imaging company DigitalGlobe has announced that it will launch two new high resolution satellites in the next three years.

DigitalGlobe® announced details of the company’s next generation of imaging systems, WorldView I and WorldView II.
DigitalGlobe has been building both imaging systems concurrently.
WorldView I, combined with QuickBird, will enable DigitalGlobe to have the two highest resolution commercial
imaging satellites on-orbit for at least a year before any comparable system is launched. By 2008, DigitalGlobe’s
constellation of high-resolution satellites will be unprecedented in the commercial satellite imaging industry,
enabling commercial and government customers around the globe to access a broad selection of geospatial information products
from a single source.

WorldView I, scheduled to launch no later than 2006, will be the most agile satellite ever flown commercially.
The high-capacity, panchromatic imaging system features half-meter resolution imagery. With an average revisit time of 1.7
days and a swath width of 16 kilometers, WorldView I will be capable of collecting up to 500,000 square kilometers (200,000 sq. mi.)
per day of half-meter imagery. WorldView I will also be capable of directly downlinking imagery to customer locations.
The satellite will be equipped with state-of-the-art geo-location accuracy capability and will exhibit stunning
agility with rapid targeting and efficient in-track stereo collection.

WorldView II is planned to launch no later than 2008. Operating at an altitude of 770 kilometers,
WorldView II will enable DigitalGlobe to offer half-meter panchromatic resolution and 1.8- meter multispectral resolution.
The WorldView II system will allow DigitalGlobe to substantially expand its imagery product offerings to both commercial and
international customers with a more commercially desirable, higher performance product. Added spectral diversity will provide
the ability to perform precise change detection and mapping. WorldView II will incorporate the industry standard four
multispectral bands (red, blue, green and near-infrared) and will also include four new bands (coastal, yellow, red edge,
and near-infrared 2). The highly agile WorldView II will be capable of directly downlinking imagery to customer locations
and will also have direct tasking capabilities.