The latest report on commercial satellite imaging pegs the market at more than $5bn by 2019. The report says that apart from a major chunk of business from the defense procurements of various countries, the share from the energy, natural resource management, commercial enterprises, civil engineering, forestry & agriculture and insurance sector will be substantial.
But, just about four months ago, another report had quoted a figure of $3.5bn for the same. In a market where almost everyone is trying to indigenously manage their data requirements by launching their own 'imaging devices', these predictions appear a bit misplaced, especially the predicted jump in business by $1.5bn in the reports. Today, the oil, gas and mineral exploration sector can getaway by using free-of-cost archived data from NASA, ISRO and other similar agencies for their reconnaissance studies, as conventional multispectral, albeit high resolution imagery analysis does not yield much information for such work. The need of the hour is hyperspectral data for this market. So, unless these market reports referred above are considering the availability of hyperspectral satellite data, the predictions on imagery sales revenues appears imaginary.
The latest to join the free data ideology is France… cheers!
This post was published as editorial in Geospatial World Weekly.
