Vantor's Open Satellite Feed
Mark Litwintschik
I'm a Big Data, AI, GIS & Networking Consultant with clients in the UK, USA, Sweden, Ireland & Germany. Past clients include BAA plc, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Blackberry, Bloomberg, British Telecom, Ford, Google, ITV, IMG, Nando's, News UK, Pizza Hut, Royal Mail, T-Mobile, Williams Formula 1, Wise & UBS. I hold both a Canadian and a British passport as well as permanent residence in Estonia. Find me on LinkedIn & X.
Vantor's Open Satellite Feed
Vantor is the Colorado-based Intelligence offshoot of Maxar. It was formed last year after Maxar, a once publicly-traded satellite manufacturer and constellation operator, was broken up into two separate firms.
Vantor publish satellite imagery from constellations that were built and launched between the late 1990s till as recently as February of last year.
These are their WorldView Legion 3 and 4 satellites as they were being prepared for launch in August of 2024.
In 2023, I covered the open S3 bucket of Maxar's satellite feeds. Early this year, Vantor set up a brand new S3 bucket. Its purpose is to share imagery from disaster-struck parts of the globe. The imagery can often be captured and appear in the bucket within a two-hour time window.
In this post, I'll explore Vantor's new open S3 bucket.
My Workstation
I'm using a 5.7 GHz AMD Ryzen 9 9950X CPU. It has 16 cores and 32 threads and 1.2 MB of L1, 16 MB of L2 and 64 MB of L3 cache. It has a liquid cooler attached and is housed in a spacious, full-sized Cooler Master HAF 700 computer case.
The system has 96 GB of DDR5 RAM clocked at 4,800 MT/s and a 5th-generation, Crucial T700 4 TB NVMe M.2 SSD which can read at speeds up to 12,400 MB/s. There is a heatsink on the SSD to help keep its temperature down. This is my system's C drive.
The system is powered by a 1,200-watt, fully modular Corsair Power Supply and is sat on an ASRock X870E Nova 90 Motherboard.
I'm running Ubuntu 24 LTS via Microsoft's Ubuntu for Windows on Windows 11 Pro. In case you're wondering why I don't run a Linux-based desktop as my primary work environment, I'm still using an Nvidia GTX 1080 GPU which has better driver support on Windows and ArcGIS Pro only supports Windows natively.
Installing Prerequisites
I'll use the AWS CLI and jq in this post.
$ sudo apt update<br>$ sudo apt install \<br>awscli \<br>jq
I'll use DuckDB, along with its H3, JSON, Lindel, Parquet and Spatial extensions in this post.
$ cd ~<br>$ wget -c https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/download/v1.5.4/duckdb_cli-linux-amd64.zip<br>$ unzip -j duckdb_cli-linux-amd64.zip<br>$ chmod +x duckdb<br>$ ~/duckdb
INSTALL h3 FROM community;<br>INSTALL lindel FROM community;<br>INSTALL json;<br>INSTALL parquet;<br>INSTALL spatial;
I'll set up DuckDB to load every installed extension each time it launches.
$ vi ~/.duckdbrc
.timer on<br>.width 180<br>LOAD h3;<br>LOAD lindel;<br>LOAD json;<br>LOAD parquet;<br>LOAD spatial;
The maps in this post were rendered with QGIS version 4.0.3. QGIS is a desktop application that runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. The application has grown in popularity in recent years and has ~15M application launches from users all around the world each month.
The administrative boundaries and populated places data was sourced from Natural Earth. The constellation details were sourced from GCAT.
Vantor's Constellations
These are the details of Vantor's satellite constellations both past and present.
$ ~/duckdb
SELECT Name,<br>JCAT,<br>Manufacturer,<br>Owner,<br>LDate,<br>Launch_Tag,<br>Bus,<br>Shape,<br>DryMass,<br>Length,<br>Diameter,<br>Span,<br>TotMass,<br>OpOrbit,<br>Apogee,<br>Inc,<br>Perigee,<br>Status<br>FROM '/home/mark/gcat/satcat.parquet'<br>WHERE ( NAME ILIKE 'WorldView%'<br>OR NAME ILIKE 'GeoEye%'<br>OR NAME ILIKE 'IKONOS%'<br>OR NAME ILIKE 'QuickBird%')<br>ORDER BY Launch_Tag,<br>Name;
┌────────────────────┬─────────┬──────────────┬─────────┬─────────────┬────────────┬──────────┬──────────────────┬─────────┬────────┬──────────┬───────┬─────────┬─────────┬────────┬───────┬─────────┬────────────────────┐<br>│ Name │ JCAT │ Manufacturer │ Owner │ LDate │ Launch_Tag │ Bus │ Shape │ DryMass │ Length │ Diameter │ Span │ TotMass │ OpOrbit │ Apogee │ Inc │ Perigee │ Status │<br>│ varchar │ varchar │ varchar │ varchar │ varchar │ varchar │ varchar │ varchar │ varchar │ float │ float │ float │ float │ varchar │ int32 │ float │ varchar │ varchar │<br>├────────────────────┼─────────┼──────────────┼─────────┼─────────────┼────────────┼──────────┼──────────────────┼─────────┼────────┼──────────┼───────┼─────────┼─────────┼────────┼───────┼─────────┼────────────────────┤<br>│ Ikonos │ S25919 │ LMMS │ SIMG │ 1999 Sep 24 │ 1999-051 │ LM-900 │ Box + Pan │ 688 │ 2.0 │ 1.5 │ 2.0 │ 726.0 │ LEO/S │ 682 │ 98.19 │ 677 │ In orbit │<br>│ QuickBird 1 │ S26617 │ BALL │ EWAT │ 2000 Nov 20 │ 2000-074 │ BCP-2000 │ Box + 2 Pan │ 900 │ 2.5 │ 1.0 │ 3.0 │ 2365.0 │ LLEO/I │ 614 │ 65.78 │ 81 │ Reentered attached │<br>│ QuickBird 2 │ S26953 │ BALL │ EWAT │ 2001 Oct 18 │ 2001-047 │ BCP-2000 │ Box + 2 Pan │ 996 │ 3.0 │ 1.6 │ 5.2 │ 1028.0 │...