EO Satellite OrbView-3 Successfully Launched

Lord Satri writes "Orbview-3 today has joined the flock of Earth Observation satellites. OrbView-3 will deliver 1 m (panchromatic) and 4 m spatial resolution (4 multispectral bands). Amongts other EO high-resolution satellites of importance are QuickBird, Ikonos and Eros-1A."

Comments

Good for Orbital Sciences

[Valdrax]

This is a good thing for Orbital Sciences. On September 21st, 2001, Orbital Sciences lost a major satellite called Orbview-4 during the launch. I remember this because the project I was working on at the time was under a huge amount of pressure to try and release as soon as possible after Orbview-4 went up. One of the sensors on Orbview-4, Warfighter-1, was a hyperspectral sensor that was going to give the US military a lot of new, valuable data, and we were at risk of losing out a bid against a competitor to provide them with the software to work with this data. Fortunately (for us) when the satellite failed to achieve orbit, we got a several month reprieve to hammer out bugs in the software. On the down side, there was no huge customer base biting at the bit for the software by the time it came out.

Orbital Imaging, the subsidy of Orbital Sciences that launched the probe, was pretty cash-strapped at the time. If I recall correctly, they had to file Chapter 11 after the loss. Fortunately, they insured Orbview-4, so they didn't take a total loss on it. NASA also lost the QuickTOMS (Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer) satellite in the same launch. At the time, they expected the much delayed Orbview-3 to launch sometime last year. Anyway, it's a good thing to see them get this one up in the sky finally. Hopefully, it'll bring them enough revenue to offset their losses from the past few years.