When a crisis occurs on the scale of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan, we all want to help. We thought you might like to know that GeoEye has been supporting the relief efforts by providing its satellite imagery of the devastation in northern Japan to relief agencies, governments and the media.

GeoEye's top priority: Delivering precise satellite imagery to relief agencies, governments and the media
As soon as the news broke that a major earthquake hit the northern coast of Japan, the GeoEye team quickly began collecting post-earthquake imagery of Japan and provisioning our online Web services platform, EyeQ, so our partners in Japan could use it to aid their country.

By sheer coincidence, the first international license for EyeQ was in Japan, and our partner there, Japan Space Imaging, is using EyeQ to help with the massive disaster relief effort.

On March 11, 2011, GeoEye's order management team began directing our high-resolution satellites to collect color imagery over the Oshika Peninsula. IKONOS captured the first post-earthquake image at 10:36 a.m. local time. As of March 21, GeoEye had provided 29,000 square kilometers of imagery to Google.

We also gave them special permission to load our Japan data into Google Earth Enterprise on the Go on laptops that were provided to first responders traveling from the U.S. to Japan so they could use the data even where they didn't have Internet connectivity.

GeoEye's imagery is the foundation for detecting change
Emergency first responders and the geospatial community are using our imagery as a base map to produce multiple-layer relief maps to assist with damage assessment, route planning and other crucial aspects of this relief effort.

Elite search-and-rescue teams that have flown to Japan from around the world to assist in this enormous relief effort are using our imagery to help locate the missing.

In addition, our "before-and-after" imagery has given people around the world an instant understanding of the extent of the destruction. We have posted several new before-and-after "slider" images on our Web site, which reveal the extent of the devastation in Japan.