Gaborone happens to be the capital and largest city of Botswana. Gaborone is the political and economic capital of Botswana, home to its largest companies and the Botswana Stock Exchange. It also serves as the headquarters of the Southern African Development Community. Gaborone has a hot semi-arid climate. Most of the year, Gaborone is very sunny. Precipitation in Gaborone is scanty and erratic. About 46 percent of Gaborone’s surface area has been zoned for agricultural production. While agriculture comprises less than 2 percent of GDP in Botswana, it is vital to the livelihood of many citizens who operate subsistence farms. Livestock production, especially cattle, drives an estimated 80% of the agricultural GDP. Beef is Botswana’s primary agricultural product for export. Livestock production exceeds domestic needs, and the country has exported range-fed beef to the European Union. Cereals are the most commonly raised crop in Gaborone, but it is constrained by productivity, unreliable water supply and the fact that 70% of Botswana’s landscape consists of desert and poor soils. Local cereal production is dominated by sorghum, maize and millet. In the images above, we can see the colorful fields of cereals being grown northeast of Gaborne and also dwellings scattered amongst the fields. These 30-cm WorldView Legion images were collected on January 29, 2025, and have custom processing and color balance applied by Apollo Mapping. (Satellite Imagery © 2025 Maxar Technologies)
In this monthly article, we travel the world to check out unique, fun and sometimes a bit weird 30-centimeter (cm) color imagery samples from the WorldView constellation. In May, our focus was an image of Isla Floreana in the Galapagos Islands. For this edition of the 30-cm Color WorldView Image of the Month, we feature two images over agricultural fields northeast of Gaborone, Botswana.
30-cm WorldView-3 (WV3) launched in late 2014, WorldView-4 (WV4) launched in late 2016 and then the first WorldView Legion satellites launched in 2024. Taken together, this is the most advanced satellite constellation the commercial marketplace has ever had access to. Here are a few of the features that really set these satellites apart from the competition:
- Improved Resolution
- Higher resolution means you can see more detail in WorldView imagery.
- Data collected at nadir will have 31-centimeter (cm) panchromatic, 1.24-meter (m) visible and near infrared, 3.7-m SWIR (WV3 only) and 30-m CAVIS (WV3 only) bands.
- Additional Spectral Bands
- If spectral analysis is part of your project, then no other satellite can match WorldView-3 and WorldView Legion with their 8 bands of visible and near-infrared data; and then 8 shortwave infrared bands (WV3 only) which are crucial for geological studies.
- Better Positional Accuracy
- With accuracies of 3.5-m CE90% or better (without ground control even!), the 30-cm WorldView constellation has no rivals for its enhanced positional accuracy.
- Daily Revisits
- With multiple WorldView-3 and WorldView Legion satellites orbiting our planet, daily revisits are available for most locations.
- WV4 is no longer collecting new imagery.
- Increased Collection Capacity
- WV3/4 feature 13.1-km swath widths (at nadir) with the ability to collect up to 680,000 square kilometers (sq km) of high-resolution data per day per satellite (though WV4 is dead now).
- When fully launched, WorldView Legion will feature six 30-cm satellites, significantly boosting the collection capacity of this leading high-resolution constellation.
If you are interested in WorldView-3, WorldView-4 and/or WorldView Legion imagery for your next project, please let us know by phone, 303-993-3863, or by email, sales@apollomapping.com.
You can also find more WV3 samples and technical information on our website here; WV4 samples and information can be found here; and then finally here is .
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