GeoEye Signs Contract With Telespazio for GeoEye-1

29 October 2008, 11:19am

DULLES, Va., Oct. 29 - GeoEye, Inc. announced today that on October 15, it signed a multi-year agreement with Rome-based Telespazio S.p.A. appointing Telespazio as GeoEye's new Commercial Regional Affiliate for the region of Europe and North Africa.

Telespazio, a Finmeccanica/Thales company, will produce, market and sell Earth imagery and related products and services from GeoEye's newest high-resolution satellite, GeoEye-1, to customers in Europe and North Africa.

GeoEye-1 was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California on September 6 and is expected to be fully operational this fall. Telespazio's GeoEye-1 exclusive imagery sales rights begin as soon as GeoEye-1 becomes operational.

Beginning in 2009, Telespazio will also have access to the IKONOS satellite and collect, produce, market and sell Earth imagery and related products to customers in Europe and North Africa. Telespazio's IKONOS rights will include the exclusive right to sell IKONOS imagery collected after December 31, 2008.

The GeoEye-1 and IKONOS satellite imagery collection, processing and sales rights granted to Telespazio are subject to prior U.S. Government approval of the multi-year agreement.

The multi-year agreement with Telespazio marks the first of its kind under GeoEye's Commercial Regional Affiliate business model, which was developed as a new service offering to augment the global commercialization of GeoEye-1 imagery.

"Telespazio has long been a leader in the Earth observation sector in Europe, and we are delighted to have them as our newest Commercial Regional Affiliate," said Matthew O'Connell, GeoEye's chief executive officer and president. "Their recent acquisition of several large companies has assured
us of Telespazio's strong commitment to developing GeoEye-1's presence in the European commercial and government geospatial markets."

Paolo Colombi, GeoEye's vice president of international sales, added, "The European market is thriving. We expect our association with Telespazio to optimize our market penetration in this important part of the world," he said.

"We plan to integrate imagery from the IKONOS and GeoEye-1 satellites with geospatial information software technology for customers within government and business markets throughout Europe and North Africa," said Giuseppe Veredice, Telespazio's chief executive officer. "We believe that the fast collection of fresh optical images from IKONOS and Geo-Eye-1 satellites combined with the high revisit - up to every 6 hours - of radar images from COSMO-SkyMed's four satellite constellation, will represent a unique
capability for providing timely information for natural resource management and for response to emergency and security requirements."

GeoEye-1 Satellite

GeoEye-1 collects imagery that can distinguish objects on the Earth's surface as small as 0.41-meter or about 16 inches in size in its black and white mode and 1.65-meter resolution color (or multispectral) imagery. Through a
proprietary production capability, commercial customers will have access to color imagery at the .5 meter resolution, which no other commercial imaging company will be able to match.

GeoEye

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