CRSS (Commercial Remote Sensing System) was a remote sensing imaging satellite project of Lockheed Martin that started in 1991. In 1994 a new company was formed for this venture - Space Imaging Inc. with the following partners: LMMS (Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space)(space segment, satellite operations, and tasking of ground segment) and Raytheon/E-Systems (communications, image processing and customer service centre). Eastman Kodak Co. designed and built the digital camera/sensor.

In 1995, Space Imaging was awarded a license by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to construct, launch and operate a commercial remote sensing satellite system comprised of two satellites. In 1997 the CRSS satellite was renamed by Space Imaging to 'IKONOS-1', supposedly a variant of the Greek word 'eikon' (icon), meaning "image." Space Imaging acquired EOSAT (a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Hughes Aircraft) in 1995. The new company was subsequently renamed Space Imaging Inc.

A launch of IKONOS-1 took place on 27 April 1999 from VAFB aboard an Athena 2 launcher. Unfortunately, there was a complete loss of the satellite.

The identical IKONOS-2 was launched successfully on 24 September 1999.

Space Imaging began to sell IKONOS-2 imagery on 1 January 2000. With IKONOS-2, a new era of 1 m spatial resolution imagery began for spaceborne instruments in the field of civil Earth observation. IKONOS-2 was the first satellite to collect publicly-available high-resolution imagery at 1- and 4-metre resolution. It collected multispectral (MS) and panchromatic (PAN) imagery.

The IKONOS project was managed by Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space. The satellite was designed and built by Lockheed Martin Commercial Space Systems.

IKONOS-2 was a three-axis stabilised spacecraft, using the LM900 satellite bus system (also referred to as Block-1). The LM900 spacecraft design was based on the CRSS imaging bus. The attitude was measured by two star trackers and a Sun sensor and controlled by four reaction wheels (actuators); location knowledge was provided by a GPS receiver.

The spacecraft provided precision pointing on an ultra-stable highly agile platform. The spacecraft featured a body-pointing technique permitting a field of regard (FOR) of ±30° into any direction. This provided excellent observation capabilities. 1.5 kW of power was provided by three solar panels.

The spacecraft operations of IKONOS-2 were unique among the commercial imaging satellites at the time in that they allowed each international affiliate to operate its own ground station(s). These ground stations were assigned blocks of time on the satellite during which they could directly task IKONOS, and immediately receive the downlinked imagery for which they tasked. In addition to virtually instant data receipt, this allowed each affiliate to make the best use of local weather data. However, this capability was only available when the ground station was in contact with IKONOS.

IKON0S-2 was in a Sun-synchronous near-polar circular orbit with an altitude between 681 and 709 km. The repeat cycle was a maximum of 14 days. The local equator crossing time was at 10:30 flying north-south.

DigitalGlobe operated IKONOS-2 until its retirement and during its lifetime, IKONOS-2 produced 597,802 public images, covering more than 400 million km².

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