I remember back in August 2014, when the first images from WorldView-3 were being downloaded. WorldView-3 was the first one-foot-resolution commercial satellite. It operated at an altitude of 617 km, flew in a sun synchronous orbit and could collect up to 680,000 km² per day. It had 31 cm panchromatic resolution, could capture 680,000 km2 per day, and had an average revisit time of less than a day. In 2021 MAXAR is planning to launch the WorldView Legion constellation, six satellites with 30 cm resolution, better than 5 meter absolute accuracy, able to capture 5 million km2 every day, and with up to 15 revisits per day.
At GeoIgnite Online 2020 Kumar Navulur, Chris Formeller, and Kathryn Seitz presented an overview of the specifications and capabilities of the Legion constellation. The total land mass of the Earth is 148.9 million km2. The new constellation will be able to capture 30 cm imagery of over 3 % of that every day. Over much of the lower 48 states in the U.S. it will be able to revisit the same location 15 times per day. Over Canada it will be closer to 8 revisits per day. Some of the satellites will fly sun synchronous orbits and others mid-inclination orbits. What this means practically is that it will be possible to capture imagery at different local times of the day, unlike with sun synchronous orbits where imagery is captured at the same local time every day. For many customers imagery will be available within 24 hours of capture.
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