NASA and the US Department of the Interior presented the 2010 William T. Pecora group award to the US Air Force Eagle Vision program Tuesday 15th February 2011 at a Pentagon ceremony. Eagle Vision was recognised for contributions in the United States and abroad to homeland security, humanitarian aid and natural disaster recovery efforts.
The programme consists of five ground stations capable of retrieving real-time satellite imagery from numerous commercial Earth-observing satellites to deliver time-critical precision images to support US global crisis response. The ground stations are deployable worldwide. The programme was created in 1995 in response to the post-Desert Storm need for timely, unclassified imagery the US military could share with our allies. Since then the program has aided natural disaster relief and humanitarian efforts, including fighting wildfires in California and relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina.
Outside the United States, the Eagle Vision team provided support to 19 different disaster events in six different countries during 2009. Two Eagle Vision units provided Haiti earthquake first responders with images within 24 hours of the quake. 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: GIM International
