Data Inquiries

Along with the renowned Rutherford Appleton Laboratories (RAL) and MDA Systems, Inc., UrtheCast is building and testing one medium-resolution camera (MRC) and one high-resolution camera (HRC), to be installed on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2013.

Image Data

Allows for a longitudinal look at various locations (that will be imaged about 16 times/day)
Image quality will be comparable to that of Google Earth
Large objects and groups of people will be discernible
Ground pixel size near 1.1 meters
5-meter image resolution

The HRC will be attached to a steerable platform, allowing for higher accuracy. The HRC will take video of the Earth with a full-frame image rate of 3.25 frames per second.

The MRC is fixed and will point almost straight down, remaining within a few degrees of nadir—the vector that points straight down from the ISS. This “Push Broom Imager” takes a continuous image strip along the path of the ISS, creating high-resolution colour image strips of Earth that are 47.3 kilometers wide.

Data Movement

UrtheCast anticipates having approximately eight ground stations in place around the world. As the ISS passes over a ground station, data will be dropped to the station using a high-speed downlink. From the here, data will be sent to UrtheCast’s processing centre and finally, a cloud-based archive. In this way, image data and video data can be sent immediately to the UrtheCast web platform.

Please contact us for further information.