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GeoEye’s Satellites
Circling the Earth are a trio of satellites owned by GeoEye, a company that supplies a good chunk of the overhead images seen on services such as Google Earth and Google Maps.
Those satellites deliver a steady stream of images to the Virginia-based firm, which sells them to commercial and government clients. One of the company’s satellites, for example, captured the images of President Barack Obama’s inauguration for CNN within a few hours of the event, prompting the network to suggest it was history in the making, with the “fastest nonmilitary turnaround of a satellite image.”
To get something like that ready for the general public is no easy task. And that’s where St. Louis enters the picture.
GeoEye has about 85 employees in Maryland Heights who specialize in taking the raw images supplied by satellites and airplanes and turning them into something the average person can appreciate.
And because of the popularity of Google Earth and Google Maps — which offer all sorts of views of our world — business is booming in Maryland Heights.
“It certainly makes it easier to explain to people what we do here,” said Kevin Kohm, an engineering director at GeoEye.
What they do is take great volumes of raw images and make them more palatable to the eye. While raw images might be fine for the military and some government clients, most people would never be content to be handed the raw feeds coming from those satellites.
“That’s not acceptable. You can’t sell that,” said Ray Helmering, a vice president of engineering.
The Maryland Heights operation, which recently underwent a $1 million expansion, performs several functions.
Most satellite images are actually compiled from multiple pictures. Engineers must combine dozens or even hundreds of them into a single picture.
Those images, which are sometimes captured at different times of day and in varied weather conditions, must be corrected so that the entire image appears uniform. They also eliminate the apparent tilting — it’s the result of the high camera angle — of buildings photographed by satellites.
Images have to be adjusted so that geographic elements such as roads and rivers are lined up.
Along with commercial services like Google Earth and some video game makers, the company also supplies images used for things like oil and gas exploration, agricultural monitoring, urban planning and disaster recovery.
Before and after shots can be critical both for locating victims and putting an area back together afterward, said Matt O’Connell, the company’s chief executive.
“During Katrina, we were literally getting calls around the clock from the government,” he said.