Rapid Eye
From INVESaTWIKI
Rapid Eye
RapidEye AG was founded 1998 in Munich as
spin-off of the company Kayser-Threde. Based on
application business experiences there, the idea was
to define a privately owned multi-satellite system for
a fast, if not daily—“rapid” coverage of primarily
agricultural areas. Precision farming, hail damage insurance
and agricultural mapping services are among
the prime application targets. To meet these requirements,
a five satellite constellation, with 6.5m resolution,
80 km swath and 5 spectral bands imager was
designed.
After some years of dealing with the challenging
goal to get a primary private financing of the system
in place, a loan agreement between RapidEye AG,
Munich and an international banking consortium,
backed by a guarantee of the German Government and
the State of Brandenburg, was signed in June 2003.
MacDonald Dettwiler, Richmond, British Columbia
(MDA), will be the general contractor—and an additional
investor—for the system. Surrey Satellite Technology Inc., Guildford, UK, will be the subcontractor
for the satellites while Jena Optronik GmbH,
Jena, Germany, will supply the cameras . The
system is planned to be deployed in the 2007/2008
timeframe.
Though not addressing the VHR market, the near
daily revisit capability and the commercial business
approach, which includes also North America as a
prime market, makes RapidEye an interesting system
in the context of this paper. Also because the so far
leading land/vegetation mapping systems in the mid
to high resolution domain, i.e. Landsat and SPOT, are
in question to be continued over the next years. However,
services such as GMES are in demand for this
kind of data. [1]
References
[1] G.Schreier, S.Dech
"High resolution Earth observation satellites and services in the next decade - A european perspective".
