So our search and rescue team would like to be able to view ESRI's World Imagery basemap through the free tool (*ArcGIS Explorer*). Thing is, we will be offline when we are in the field. So - is there a way to download our region of the ESRI World Imagery basemap, for use offline?

Note, I'm not a GIS professional, so am probably mixing some terminology.

I found the URL where the World Imagery basemap data lives, and the query form to get back a flat image (jpg I think). But, we would really like to have it integrated as a basemap so we can use it seamlessly in `ArcGIS Explorer`. (Is a basemap a different beast than just a raster layer?)

Is there any way to get this as a 'Data Appliance' from ESRI? [link](http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/data-appliance)

Our county staff uses the full paid ArcGIS tools so they might be able to get them for our SAR team's use - the issue is that we would want to view it offline in the free tool on our laptops in the field.

We really do want to use ESRI World Imagery, or an equivalent (`it is 1 foot = 1 pixel in our area`).

Thanks

**UPDATE - 2013-10-01 - SOLVED:**

gmapcatcher does the trick perfectly. It doesn't read from ESRI World Imagery, but it does download tiles from Bing and others (0.3m in our area) for offline viewing. It's not very feature-rich but that is a big part of the appeal! Learning curve is just about zero. There's probably a fairly easy way to turn those downloaded tiles into a correct directory structure for serving a tileset on MapServer, in order to use it with more feature-packed tools. If anyone finds a quick way to do that tile-file-rearranging please post here, thanks!