WorldView-1 was partially financed through an agreement with the United States National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). Some of the imagery captured by WorldView-1 for the NGA is not available to the general public.

Learn about Maxar's WorldView Constellation, which is part of ESA's Third Party Missions programme:

BATC (Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation) provided the spacecraft bus (Ball Commercial Platform BCP-5000) and a WorldView-60 camera. A feature of the WorldView spacecraft are CMG (Control Moment Gyroscopes) actuators for precise and highly responsive pointing control. The BCP-5000 bus provides increased power, stability, agility, data storage and transmission (over the BCP-2000 bus) as the demand for Earth remote-sensing information becomes more comprehensive.

The spacecraft is three-axis stabilised. The ADCS (Attitude Determination and Control Subsystem) employs star trackers, IRU (Inertial Reference Unit) and GPS for attitude sensing, and CMGs as actuators. A body-pointing range of ±40° about nadir is provided corresponding to a FOR (Field of Regard) of 775 km in cross-track. An instantaneous pointing accuracy of ≤ 500 m is provided at any start and stop of an imaging sequence. 

Unlike traditional stepper motor solar array drives, its QuAD technology provides low disturbance actuation, allowing spacecraft images to be captured at the same time that the solar arrays are being pointed. 

WorldView-1 circles Earth in a 496 km, 98 degree Sun-synchronous orbit, which provides consistent two day revisit to areas of interest at mid-latitudes.

WorldView data can be received by customer ground stations. Amazon Web Services have set up a cloud service for customers to receive data from the Amazon ground station.

Learn more about WorldView-1:

• WorldView-1 on the eoPortal*
• WorldView-1 on the EUSI website*

*The information provided is sourced and updated by external entities. For further details, please consult our Terms and Conditions page.