Barry Rice

- doing science on a terrestrial planet -



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Instrument profile: IKONOS--the name is derived from the Greek word for image

Previously owned by SpaceImaging, a privately owned company that provides panchromatic and multispectral imagery for a variety of industry applications. The revisiting time for a typical site is 3 days. SpaceImaging classifies its data products by the degree of positional accuracy. The least accurate products have a 50 meter registration uncertainty; the most accurate have a 2 meter uncertainty. Stereo pairs and other options are available for many of their products. Because of the nature of IKONOS's orbit, all images are taken at approximately 10:30 a.m. local sun time.

Usefulness to land managers
Inexpensive, high quality data. Likely to be useful to those who are satisfied with panchromatic or multispectral imagery. This is a similar product to QuickBird or SPOT data.

Costs and Contacts
IKONOS images are sold on a square kilometer basis. The image costs range according to the accuracy with which they are georeferenced. Prices for two sample packages are given below (as of 23 September 2004 for USA images). Archival images cost less than new images that are obtained at the client's request. Images will have no more than 20% cloud cover, and a single point can be specified as having to be cloud-free.

Geo Image Producta Pro Image Productb
Archival Imageryc $7.70/km2 $31.90/km2
New Imageryd $19.80/km2 $31.90/km2
aApproximately 15m accuracy positional uncertainty.
bApproximately 10m accuracy positional uncertainty.
cMinimum purchase: 49km2
dMinimum purchase: 100km2


Sample images (1m sharpened imagery)


California fires
False color

California fires
True color

Victoria Falls
True color

Akkeshi Lake
True color

Useful Web Sites
See above.

Technical Specs

Image data characteristics
Band Spectral Coverage Spatial resolutiona
Panchromatic 530-930 nm 1m
1: Blue 450-520 nm 4m
2: Green 510-600 nm 4m
3: Red 630-700 nm 4m
4: Near IR 760-850 nm 4m
True/False Colorb As requested 1m sharpened
aThe 4m multispectral resolution is "sharpened" to 1m resolution using the panchromatic data.
bThese images are composites of any three bands 1,2,3, and 4.


References
http://www.spaceimaging.com/products/ikonos/spectral.htm--accessed 23 Sept. 2004
http://www.spaceimaging.com/whitepapers_pdfs/IKONOS_Product_Guide.pdf--accessed 23 Sept. 2004

 
 

4 February 2009