“Seeing the flag makes our government customers unbelievably happy,” laughs Dierks. Behind it, a giant Stars and Stripes flag has been painted across the wall. The big difference – apart from the size – between this and a typical handheld digital camera, is that the spacecraft will not just take snapshots but continuous images along thin strips of land or sea. The light comes in through a barrel structure, pointed at the Earth, and is bounced around by a series of mirrors, before being focused onto a CCD sensor. With its long cylindrical shape, WorldView-3 looks more like a telescope than a camera and it works on the same principle. “At its simplest, it is a decent resolution digital camera in space,” he explains, as we peer through the window into the clean room where the spacecraft is being built. What’s surprising is how basic the technology is. Rather than operate its own spacecraft, Google buys its images from a small number of commercial satellite operators, and Dierks has worked on most of the satellites used. “It gives me a lot of pride when I see a satellite image on a news programme with the DigitalGlobe logo on them.”

“Everybody I’m sure has looked up their house, their downtown, their business on Google Earth, and seen images from these satellites,” says Jeff Dierks, Program Manager at Ball. Together they have changed the way we view the world. This month Google Maps celebrates its ninth anniversary, and in June so does the company’s 3-D mapping app, Google Earth. It is the latest in a series of spacecraft designed to beam back high-resolution pictures of our planet, images that most of us will eventually see on Google Maps or Google Earth.

Spinning around the planet some 600 kilometres (370 miles) above us, it will cover every part of the Earth’s surface every couple of days.īall Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado is building WorldView-3 for commercial satellite operator DigitalGlobe. Once in orbit later this year, WorldView-3 will be one of the most powerful Earth observation satellites ever sent into space by a private company. Behind a long rectangular window, in a high white room tended by ghostly figures in masks and hats, a new satellite is taking shape.

Satellite map of my house