The agencies honored the Eagle Vision program with the 2010 William T. Pecora award during a Pentagon ceremony Feb. 15. Eagle Vision was recognized for domestic and international contributions to homeland security, humanitarian aid and natural disaster recovery efforts. The system consists of five deployable satellite downlink stations that collect and process near-real-time optical and synthetic aperture radar imagery from commercial satellite constellations. It ensures that U.S. forces or disaster responders have current, high-resolution imagery of an area of interest.
Among recent notable incidents, the Eagle Vision imagery collection team here sprang into action within hours of the 7.0 earthquake that devastated much of Haiti last year. Two Eagle Vision units provided Haiti earthquake first responders with images within 24 hours of the quake. Disaster response officials used the satellite imagery to plan, prioritize and optimize their actions, often comparing overlays that contrast current conditions with pre-disaster imagery. The program also has aided many other natural disaster relief and humanitarian efforts, including responses to the California wildfires and to Hurricane Katrina. Outside the United States, the Eagle Vision team provided support to 19 different disaster relief efforts in six different countries during 2009. Units also were deployed to Africa between 2004 and 2007 to collect commercial satellite imagery of Chad, Mauritania, Uganda and Niger to build a broad-area geospatial library for humanitarian support.
Published by: Satnews on February 21, 2011
Full article: http://www.satnews.com/cgi-bin/story.cgi?number=1422998707
