WorldView-2 Media Kit
WorldView-2 Mission & Program Information
WorldView-2 is the most advanced remote sensing satellite ever developed for the commercial market.
Ball Aerospace has provided a Ball Commercial Platform (BCP) 5000 spacecraft bus for WorldView-2, integrated the remote-sensing instrument onto the bus and completed system testing.
WorldView-2 is the fourth satellite built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. for DigitalGlobe and will join QuickBird and WorldView-1 in a constellation of spacecraft that offers the best high-resolution data gathering capability available today. The high spatial resolution, multispectral imagery gathered by Ball Aerospace-built remote sensing satellites is used for civil government mapping, land-use planning, disaster relief, exploration, defense and intelligence, and visualization and simulation environments.
Program Manager Profile
Jeff Dierks, Program Manager
It’s terrific to know that very time I watch the news and see DigitalGlobe’s logo that I had some responsibility for providing the images that are both valuable and stunning.
WorldView-2 Quick Facts
- The WorldView-2 spacecraft is the eighth modified version of the successful Ball Commercial Platform 2000
- Ball Aerospace leveraged expertise from its successes on WorldView-1, QuickBird, QuikSCAT, ICESat, CloudSat, NPP, and Radarsat to develop WorldView-2
- The first two satellites in the DigitalGlobe constellation were built by Ball Aerospace: QuickBird launched on October 18, 2001 and WorldView-1 launched on September 18, 2007.
- WorldView-1 and WorldView-2 are the first commercial satellites with control moment gyroscopes (CMGs). This high-performance technology provides acceleration up to 10X that of other attitude control actuators and improves both maneuvering and targeting capability, while reducing slew time from over 60 seconds to only 9 seconds to cover 300km. This means WorldView-2 will be able to rapidly swing precisely from one target to another, allowing extensive imaging of many targets, as well as stereo, in a single orbital pass
- WorldView-2 will provide the only high resolution 8-band multispectral commercial satellite imagery available
Press Releases
August 27, 2009 – Ball Aerospace-built WorldView-2 Satellites Arrives at Vandenberg Air Force Base
http://www.ballaerospace.com/page.jsp?page=30&id=350
August 5, 2009 – Ball Aerospace Completes Successful Environmental Testing for WorldView-2 Satellite
http://www.ballaerospace.com/page.jsp?page=30&id=348
February 24, 2009 – DigitaGlobe WorldView-2 Satellite Completes Successful Instrument Integration; Progresses to Environmental Testing
http://www.ballaerospace.com/page.jsp?page=30&id=324
September 2, 2008 – Ball Aerospace Begins Integration of WorldView-2 Imaging Instrument
http://www.ballaerospace.com/page.jsp?page=30&id=305
January 2, 2007 – Ball Aerospace Wins WorldView-2 Contract
http://www.ballaerospace.com/page.jsp?page=30&id=55