For more than a decade, Apollo Mapping has been the go-to resource for geospatial professionals, remote sensing scientists, map enthusiasts, and others who need to find just the right satellite image product for their project. The firm’s online Image Hunter platform provides users with a single interface to search for that ideal image from the archives of 56 Earth observation satellites using a variety of filtering and geographic delineation tools.
While Image Hunter equips customers to query and preview the estimated 117 million image scenes contained in those archives with remarkable speed, Apollo Mapping prides itself in maintaining a human touch.
“Human curation is what sets us apart,” said Apollo Co- Founder, Brock Adam McCarty. “Once the user has completed the Image Hunter search, we personally guide them through the final selection process…and sometimes we discover it’s not the right image, and we choose another.”
When the right data sets are identified, Apollo handles the order transaction and delivers the products via Dropbox. As a value-added service, the firm has the capabilities to perform custom image processing - including orthorectification, color balancing, and mosaicking.
Apollo’s combination of automation and personal interaction has been a recipe for success for Brock and his partner, Katie Nelson (aka, The Image Hunters), who have seen their business grow steadily in the past 10 years both in terms of their customer base and the number of data sets they sell.
“We don’t have everything on the market because we are picky,” said Brock. “There’s just so many options [i.e. satellite operators], so we pick the best.”
Airbus is proud to be included in Apollo Mapping’s carefully curated selection of offerings. In fact, the SPOT satellite archive was among the first searchable by Image Hunter. And over the years, this relationship has paid off for both companies. Apollo has been recognized as a leading reseller of Airbus products and is currently the number one reseller of WorldDEM data sets in North America.
Apollo customers can currently search these Airbus databases with Image Hunter:
“Apollo is professional in everything they do, and they represent Airbus really well in the marketplace,” said Jen Kennedy, Senior Director of Sales, North America. “We know that when customers go to them with questions, Brock and Katie do everything they can to find the correct answer – and that’s why they bring Airbus customers back again and again.”
On the technical side, the modular architecture of the Image Hunter platform enables a level of agility and flexibility that appeals to Apollo customers and business partners. Shortly after the commissioning of the Pléiades Neo satellites earlier this year, Apollo was the first to integrate its query and search functionality with the Pléiades Neo API, giving customers fast access to the new data sets.
Brock confirms that Pléiades Neo data was an instant hit with Apollo clients.
“[Pléiades Neo] is great…it’s one of our top tier products,” he said. “The data looks beautiful, it’s crisp, well registered… and delivers relatively quickly.”
If you would like to try out the Image Hunter or download free sample data from Apollo:
