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Airbus has enlarged its high-resolution imagery portfolio following an agreement to leverage capacity from the S1-4 satellite built by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL). This new imagery offer called Vision-1 delivers full end-to-end imaging operations to Airbus’ customers.
Vision-1 provides 0.9m resolution imagery in the panchromatic band and 3.5m in the multispectral bands (NIR, RGB), with a 20.8km swath width. These specifications are ideal for defence, security and agriculture applications, while this extra revisit opportunity further strengthens Airbus’ satellite fleet.
“This new asset will reinforce our monitoring capabilities for sub-metre imaging, and feed our OneAtlas digital platform to provide increased freshness,” said François Lombard, Director of Intelligence Business at Airbus Defence and Space.
Vision-1 operations will be coordinated by Airbus in the UK, following integration into the UK Mission Operation Centre, which already operates the commercial imaging of the DMC Constellation. This is an important step for UK sovereign imaging capability, adding sub-metre data to the existing UK imaging capabilities.
As Vision-1 was launched in September 2018 together with NovaSAR, this opens significant opportunities for applications combining optical and radar satellite imagery.
Along with Vision-1, Airbus offers commercial access to the largest fleet of Earth Observation satellites: Pléiades, SPOT 6/7, DMC Constellation and the weather-independent radar satellites TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X and PAZ.
