#deimos2

PyeongChang Olympic venues spotted from orbit.

Friday, February 9 marks the start of the 23rd Olympic Winter Games held this year in the PyeongChang region of South Korea.

Deimos 2 recently overflew the region and captured the main Olympic venues from orbit. The 35,000 seat pentagonal Olympic stadium, dominates the first image, followed by the Olympic Village where the 2,920 athletes participating reside.

Venues for hockey, curling, ice skating and speed skating are located in the Gangneung Olympic Park, seen in the third image.

The Ski Jumping Center hosts downhill skiing events while Bokwang Phoenix Park hosts freestyle skiing and snowboarding. The final image shows the 2,018 meter-long Olympic Sliding Center track where the luge, bobsleigh and skeleton events are held.

Just a few days after rolling out of its hangar for the very first time, Deimos-2 captured the Stratolaunch mothership aircraft on the tarmac at the Mojave Air and Spaceport June 2. The aircraft has the largest wingspan of any plane in the world at 384 feet - wider than the International Space Station. Stratolaunch will carry up to three Pegasus XL rockets in between its twin fuselages before deploying them mid-flight for launch. Stratolaunch Systems will begin ground tests of the vehicle in the coming weeks before aerial flights begin mid-2018.

Inmarsat-5 F4 Falcon 9 seen atop LC-39A from space.

Deimos-2 did it again! The orbital imagery company once again captured SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket atop LC-39A this time ahead of the Inmarsat-5 F4 mission’s static fire May 11. The rocket can be seen atop its Transporter/Erector at LC-39A without a payload fairing, which is standard practice for the static fire tests. Adjacent to the vehicle is the Fixed Service Structure and Rotating Service Structure. Both are holdovers from the Shuttle program and the RSS is currently being dismantled by SpaceX.

Leading away from the rocket on the left is the former crawlerway and the tracks leading to the Falcon 9′s assembly hangar. The pad’s water tower, seen to the lower right of the vehicle, is used in conjunction with nozzles on the pad as part of the water suppression system.

Deimos-2 captured the NROL-76 mission atop LC-39A April 29 as well as other rockets on the launch pad in recent months. The satellite has a resolution of  one meter for panchromatic images and four meters for multispectral images. Deimos-2 - along with DigitalGlobe’s WorldView fleet -  is one of the only high-resolution Earth imaging satellites not under government control. Liftoff is scheduled for 7:20pm EDT. Watch the launch LIVE via SpaceX’s webcast here.

The NROL-76 mission is seen atop LC-39A in late April in an image taken by the Deimos-2 satellite.

Taking yet another stunning image of a rocket on its launch pad, the Deimos-2 satellite flew over Kennedy Space Center April 29 and captured the NROL-76 Falcon 9 atop LC-39A. The Earth imaging satellite also captured the SES-9 Falcon 9 in February 2016 on SLC-40 and its accompanying droneship in the Atlantic Ocean. With a new fleet of commercial Earth Observation satellites in orbit, photography of launch sites has increased in recent years. WorldView-2 saw its companion satellite, WorldView-4, launch into space mid-flight last November, and Deimos-2 saw the CRS-10 Falcon 9 atop LC-39A in February.

Earth-imaging company Deimos Imaging took this astounding image of LC-39A February 16 showing the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket ahead of the CRS-10 mission. While the Falcon 9 was traveling from the Horizontal Integration Facility to the launch mount, the company’s Deimos-2 satellite flew overhead. CRS-10 is scheduled to launch at 10:01am EST, February 18. Back in March, 2016, the satellite also captured the SES-9 Falcon 9 atop SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral.