The war in Ukraine has made the world aware of the geopolitical, social, and military impacts of satellite imagery. At the same time, the space industry is introducing new capabilities for “very high resolution imagery” that will make commercial spy satellites even more powerful, says a Jan. 16 report by the research and consulting firm Quilty Analytics.
“We are witnessing a transformation in the domain of very high resolution imagery,” the report says. “Established operators are launching next-generation fleets – improving their imaging capacity, pointing accuracy and revisit rates.” Meanwhile, new players that started out with low-resolution satellites “are scaling up to increasingly sharper resolutions once thought unobtainable by small satellites.”
