With the large-scale research in space sciences and technologies, there is a great demand of satellite image security system for providing secure storage and transmission of satellite images. As the demand to protect the sensitive and valuable data from satellites has increased and hence proposed a new method for satellite image security by combining DWT-DCT watermarking and AES encryption. Watermarking techniques developed for multimedia data cannot be directly applied to the satellite images because here the analytic integrity of the data, rather than perceptual quality, is of primary importance. To improve performance, combine discrete wavelet transform (DWT) with another equally powerful transform; the discrete cosine transform (DCT). The combined DWT-DCT watermarking algorithm’s imperceptibility was better than the performance of the DWT approach. Modified decision based unsymmetrical trimmed median filter (MDBUTMF) algorithm is proposed for the restoration of satellite images that are highly corrupted by salt and pepper noise. Satellite images desire not only the watermarking for copyright protection but also encryption during storage and transmission for preventing information leakage. Hence this paper investigates the security and performance level of joint DWT-DCT watermarking and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) for satellite imagery. Theoretical analysis can be done by calculating PSNR and MSE. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme, which fulfils the strict requirements concerning alterations of satellite images.