OrbView 4

OrbView 4 [OSC]

Orbview 4 was a high resolution commercial Earth imaging satellite imagery. OrbView 4's imaging instrument was to provide one-meter panchromatic imagery and four-meter multispectral imagery with a swath width of 8 km as well as 200 channel hyperspectral imagery with a swath width of 5 km. The satellite was to revisit each location on Earth in less than three days with an ability to turn from side-to-side up to 45 degrees from a polar orbital path.

The OHRIS (OrbView High Resolution Imaging System) was a body-mounted optomechanical instrument (whiskbroom scanning imager), built by Northrop Grumman. The spectral range of the instrument is 0.4 - 2.5 µm. Up to 200 contiguous spectral bands can be defined within the spectral region. A typical scene size is 5 km (swath width) × 20 km (length) with a spatial resolution of 8  m (GSD) at nadir. The data quantization is at 12 bit. No data compression was employed.

OrbView 4 was lost in an launch failure, when the Taurus-2110 carrier rocket suffered an loss of control, which was recovered, but orbit was not achieved. It was the first application of OSC's new LEOStar-2 bus.