Longmont company’s satellite lifts off successfully

Alicia Wallace

For the Ledger

WorldView-2, the next-generation imaging satellite from Longmont-based DigitalGlobe, successfully launched into orbit on Thursday.

The satellite, which will have the ability to capture up to three times the Earth’s landmass on a yearly basis, was launched from a Boeing Delta II rocket at 12:51 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Eleven minutes after launch, the rocket had met all of its marks — such as ignition, burnout and separation — as expected, Boeing officials said during a Web cast of the launch. Just before 2 p.m., the launch was concluded and DigitalGlobe officials received a downlink signal confirming the $450 million satellite successfully separated from its launch vehicle and initialized its onboard processes.

Jeff Evanson, an analyst who covers DigitalGlobe for Dougherty & Company LLC, was at Vandenberg on Thursday to watch the launch, and said that the conditions were “beautiful” and the launch went “flawlessly.”

“Now, we’re kind of in a waiting period for the first pictures,” he said.

During the coming weeks, WorldView-2 will be going through a “callibration and check out” period. The company expects to receive images from the satellite in about 90 days, officials said.

The commissioning is a fairly risky time period, Evanson said.

“In fact, there’s probably more risk,” in terms of turning on the satellite and running through all of its checks,” he said.

If everything goes as planned, Evanson said, DigitalGlobe will have the largest imagery collection capability of any company in the world.

WorldView-2 is DigitalGlobe’s third satellite in orbit, joining QuickBird and WorldView-1, which launched in October 2001 and September 2007, respectively. WorldView-2′s launch comes just one year before QuickBird’s operating life is slated to end.

The satellite is expected to boost DigitalGlobe’s collection capabilities to close to 2 million square kilometers per day and have the ability to visit a specific geographic place twice in the same day, officials have said.

The satellite’s eight-band multi-spectral capability should result in better feature identification, extraction and a more accurate reflection of the world’s natural color, officials said in a press release. DigitalGlobe officials declined an interview on Thursday.

WorldView-2′s launch also meant success for another local company, Boulder-based Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., which spent the past three years designing and constructing the satellite. New York-based ITT Corp. provided WorldView-2′s imaging system.

Shares of DigitalGlobe (NYSE: DGI) dropped 80 cents, or 3.5 percent, to $22.22 on Thursday.