Source: Defense News

It's getting harder and harder to hide.

The sharpest commercial imaging satellite ever launched is now orbiting the Earth, sweeping over the North Pole and under the South Pole every 98 minutes, collecting high-resolution images of the scene below.

From 423 miles up, the GeoEye-1 satellite can spot objects as small as 16 inches across. Home plate is visible on a baseball diamond. Obviously, then, so are trucks, troops, aircraft on runways, ships at sea and other items of particular interest to the U.S. military.

And the military will be GeoEye's biggest customer. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency had agreed to buy $197 million worth of imagery over 18 months.

An NGA spokesman said the agency already buys images that cover about 122 million square kilometers a year. Those images are gathered by GeoEye satellites Ikonos and OrbView-2. NGA image purchases could double when the higher-resolution GeoEye-1 images are available, he said.

The NGA paid GeoEye $237 million to help build the satellite - nearly half the satellite's $502 million construction and launch costs.

Another big customer is Google. The Internet giant bought exclusive rights to GeoEye images for use in its online mapping application. Google expects to sell maps to customers as diverse as mining companies, land developers and farmers.

Speeding along at 4.5 miles per second, the 4,300-pound satellite passes over any given point on earth once every three days, GeoEye spokesman Mark Brender said.

At a resolution of 0.41 centimeters, GeoEye-1 is not the keenest eye in the sky, as classified U.S. intelligence satellites are believed to see in even greater detail. But the growing demand for imagery makes GeoEye-1 a useful addition to U.S. spying capabilities.

The U.S. military "has a huge appetite for commercial satellite imagery," Brender said. "And if it's unclassified, it can be shared with allies and coalition partners. Images from classified satellites can't be easily shared."

"Every increase in satellite capacity is valuable," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. The GeoEye satellite "will ease the burden on the intelligence space infrastructure."

While they're not as sharp as classified images, GeoEye's images are "good enough" for most military purposes, Aftergood said. "The difference between .41 meters and .15 or whatever it is [for classified satellites] is significant for only a small subset of applications," he said.

GeoEye's images are "just fine" for such military uses as planning and rehearsing missions and making photo maps, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org and a respected defense, space and intelligence analyst.

Moreover, GeoEye offers something that classified satellite images don't: color. Although color images aren't as detailed, they provide much more realistic images for purposes such as planning operations, Pike said.

GeoEye published its satellite's first image Oct. 8.: a razor-sharp color shot of the campus of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. The college was the first thing the satellite saw when controllers opened its camera door, company officials said. Using an ordinary desktop computer, it is possible to zoom in enough on the image to pick out two tennis players on a green court, pedestrians on sidewalks, traffic maneuvering through an intersection, and the "Golden Bears" logo etched into one end zone of the college football field.

Such detail would be fine for "routine order-of-battle kinds of imagery" that reveals where an enemy is and what sort of weapons he has, Aftergood said.

A variety of commercial imaging satellites have proved their intelligence value in recent years. In 2007, commercial satellite imagery posted on Google Earth revealed the existence of three Chinese Jin-class ballistic submarines.

Also in 2007, commercial imagery disclosed that Iran was building tunnels inside a mountain near a nuclear site. Analysts said Iran may have been trying to hide uranium enrichment activity.

Commercial satellites exposed construction of a nuclear reactor in Syria in 2003 and the site's cleanup in 2007 after Israeli air strikes hit the reactor building.

It is likely these discoveries had also been made by U.S. classified satellites. "I would hope that U.S. intelligence agencies were not surprised" by what the commercial images revealed, Aftergood said.

However, the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies might have been surprised by GeoEye's ability to build and launch GeoEye-1. "We launched GeoEye-1 within four years of the contract award, with no cost overruns and no change orders," Brender said.

That's "near miraculous" compared with military and intelligence agency performance, Pike said. "They delivered what they said they would, when they said they would. In military terms, that just doesn't happen."

The government's most ambitious spy satellite program, the Future Imagery Architecture (FIA), for example, collapsed in 2005 after Boeing spent five years and an estimated $10 billion.

"A super satellite that is too expensive to buy is not as good as a pretty good satellite that's in operation right now," Aftergood said.

FIA's cancellation raised concern about a possible "satellite gap" as current spy satellites age and new ones are delayed.

That's another reason for the government funding of GeoEye-1. The NGA said contracts to GeoEye and another satellite company, DigitalGlobe, are intended "to guarantee future availability of high-resolution commercial imagery from U.S. companies."