EnhancedView, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) program to buy commercial off the shelf (COTS) satellite imagery, is quickly falling into place, with both primary contractors placing orders for new satellites.

The genesis of EnhancedView comes from a combination of U.S. commercial imaging companies needing a big customer and the government realizing that private industry could provide high quality imaging as a service without the bureaucracy and overhead of a project it would build from scratch. NGA will get the images it needs to support the Department of Defense and U.S. intelligence community, as well as providing humanitarian and crisis support.

A lot of money is at stake in the EnhancedView program, a total of $7.3 billion dollars over 10 years if all options are exercised. In August, NGA awarded DigitalGlobe (News - Alert) a $3.5 billion contract while GeoEye Imagery Collection Systems received a $3.8 billion award.   

DigitalGlobe will add WorldView-3 to its satellite fleet in support of EnhancedView. The new satellite is slated for launch in 2014 and will expand DigitalGlobe’s fleet to four remote-sensing satellites. Ball previously built DigitalGlobe’s other three satellites, including QuickBird launched in 2001, WorldView-1 in 2007 and WorldView-2 launched in 2009.   Space News reports that Ball received a $181 million contract for the satellite work while ITT (News - Alert) is getting $126 million to build the imager. 

Based on Ball’s BCP 5000 satellite platform; Ball will integrate the ITT imaging system onto the WorldView-3 spacecraft bus and do all system testing. The imaging system will be capable of capturing 8 band multispectral high-resolution imagery; exactly how fine has not been announced, but WorldView-2 provides resolution to 46 centimeters for government customers; commercial imagery is reworked to 50 centimeters to meet export control regulations.

However, WorldView-3 will be one-upped in the resolution area by GeoEye (News - Alert)-2, GeoEye’s new satellite. Being built by Lockheed-Martin, the ITT-supplied imager is expected to have a resolution of 33 centimeters (roughly one foot) at its operational orbit of 652 kilometers --the highest resolution device ever put on a commercial satellite; earlier releases credited the satellite with resolution of 25 centimeters (9.75 inches) in size.

GeoEye-2 will join the company’s Ikonos, OrbView-2 and GeoEye-1 satellites in orbit in late 2012; work started in 2007 with the anticipation that the U.S. government and commercial partners would need more imagery and at higher resolution.