Not content with putting two high definition cameras on the International Space Station early last year, Canadian company UrtheCast just bought itself a pair of satellites. The acquisition is the third in a string of big announcements from UrtheCast this month, which is trying to establish itself as a key player in the growing earth imaging industry.UrtheCast announced on Monday that it had acquired a "world leading satellite imagery provider," Deimos Imaging, a subsidiary of Spanish engineering and infrastructure company Elecnor S.A. The Spanish company has about 50 employees, operates the Deimos-1 and Deimos-2 earth imaging satellites, and owns a global archive of Earth imagery, according to a post on the company's blog.The cost of the sale was €74.2 million, or about $100 million CAD.Last week the Vancouver-based company unveiled a series of full-colour videos taken with its ultra-high definition Iris camera for the first time. Then, on June 19, UrtheCast announced its intention to build, launch and operate a constellation of at least 16 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging satellites, which can generate high-resolution 2D and even 3D imagery regardless of weather or time of day.Now, the Deimos satellite acquisition means that UrtheCast may soon have a trio of different space-based earth imaging sensors, assuming its SAR satellite constellation launches in 2019 and 2020 go according to plan."UrtheCast is rapidly accelerating its mission to democratize earth observation imagery, and bring a unique dataset and distribution model to customers and users that up until now, has not been available anywhere in the marketplace," explained Scott Larson, UrtheCast co-founder and CEO, in a statement.The Deimos-1 satellite was launched in 2009, and captures 22-metre resolution images over a span of 650 kilometres. Deimos-2, launched in 2014, can capture detailed 75 centimetre "pan-sharpened" images—higher-resolution grayscale images augmented with lower-resolution data from multiple spectrums—over a 12 kilometre range.The company's full imagery archive consists of a whopping 6.5 billion square kilometres, give or take.The acquisition is an important step for UrtheCast in expanding its global presence and competing against companies such as the Google-owned SkyBox, which uses low-cost Cubesats. For example, Deimos counts the European Space Agency and European governmental agencies amongst its customers—which makes them UrtheCast customers now, too.
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