This article originally appeared in the April 23, 2018 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
Customers of SecureWatch, DigitalGlobe’s geospatial intelligence subscription service, now have access to imagery from the company’s WorldView-4 high resolution optical imaging satellite launched in 2016, DigitalGlobe just announced.
DigitalGlobe is loading daily imagery from WorldView-4 and preparing to share imagery this summer from MDA’s Radarsat-2 with its SecureWatch customers, said John Cartwright, deputy general manager of international defense and intelligence at DigitalGlobe, a Maxar Technologies company.
“We’ve done a lot of the technical work to establish the linkages between the Radarsat system and SecureWatch,” Cartwright told SpaceNews. “We’ve demonstrated that can be done at scale. Now we are working closely with the MDA team to develop the offering that is the most compelling for our customers.”
Radarsat-2, a satellite launched in 2007 by MDA and the Canadian Space Agency, is equipped with a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to gather imagery in all light and weather conditions.
“From our perspective, SAR is a great complement to the WorldView electro-optical imagery we deliver today,” Cartwright said. “The two sets of data working together is greater than the sum of its parts. We are conflating and enriching a deep stack of data and bringing it together through a single point, the SecureWatch interface, to provide profound value for our customers.”
In 2017, MDA acquired of DigitalGlobe and renamed the combined company Maxar Technologies. “Within the Maxar family of companies, we’ve got the world leader in SAR at MDA,” Cartwright said. “It’s great to partner with them and develop new ways to bring SAR capability to market.”
DigitalGlobe is talking with another Maxar company, Radiant Solutions of Herndon, Virginia, about delivering additional services to customers through SecureWatch.
“A lot of the capabilities go beyond the pixel into stuff like terrain analytics and social media,” Cartwright said. “We are just scratching the surface of the very powerful things we can do for our mission partners around the world with SecureWatch.”
