A couple months after the launch, the first photos were released, and they were quite impressive.

That was last October, and ReadWriteWeb did a sidebyside comparison between the first GeoEye photo and the thencurrent Google Maps imagery of the same areaGeoEye announced the oneyear anniversary of the GeoEye1s launch today. The past year has been an exciting and rewarding one for GeoEye, said Bill Schuster, GeoEyes Chief Operating Officer. With the launch of GeoEye1 last September, we put into service the worlds most advanced commercial imagery satellite, which is delivering the highest resolution, most accurate color satellite imagery available today.Since its launch, GeoEye1 has imaged every continent in the world chronicled several noteworthy events like President Obamas inauguration ceremony and a North Korean missile facility just moments before the launch of a longrange missile collected approximately 54 million square kilometers of imagery taken over 200,000 images since its launch.GeoEye says the GeoEye 2 is in the works. The company has contracted with ITT Corporation to build the next highresolution camera and electronics. Theyre looking for commercial operations with that to get underway in 2013. No word on whether that will continue to inolve Google, or other mapproviding search engines.