Slashdot Mirror

That got modded insightful ? Get real!

"No it doesn't make sense. At a time when the internet provide dozens of different way to get that specific information, be it in several other on-line aerial-photo mapping softwares, or on various other online source,"

I don't buy that. Sure there is a lot of stuff on the internet but super high res satellite photographs of sensitive government installations ? Give me a break. That wont happen until every tom dick and harry gets his own satellite.

There are multiple sources of satellite and aerial photographs, especially when we are talking about public areas like government buildings. Someone already mentioned digitalglobe as a source google themselves might use (and which others use -- it draws on multiple sources apparently itself), and this site lists several different sources for satellite imagery which is available to the public. So yes, there are a lot of toms dicks and harrys out there with satellites. Welcome to the 21st century.

"And besides, it's just security through obscurity, and we all know very well how much that strategy works well."

Your trying to draw a parallel between two completely different fields with different goals and purposes. A government installation is not "open source software" that everyone gets a chance to get a peek see and everyone by and large is benevolent when looking at the source. When you have a country's defense on the line and a lot of baddies want to maim and kill people, obscurity is one of the best weapons. What next ? Show people on the witness relocation program on national television ?

No, the problems and solutions are not at all as disparate as you claim, by your own admission. Government facilities are indeed places where everyone gets a peek and by and large everyone is benevolent looking at the source. If you are talking about less public areas, like military installations, you would be surprised perhaps how much the public is allowed to see. Some military bases are pretty much completely ope to civilian traffic, and those which aren't often have very close perimeters. Even places like Area 51 regularly attract civilians who are able to record an awful lot of information about location of buildings, security measures, and activity. A telephoto lens and/or a telescope or set of binoculars can reveal an awful lot with little chance that the observer will be observed. And those people mostly are not trying to blow the place up.

The argument about security through obscurity is not about the moral question of keeping secrets. It is an indictment based on the fact that any security plan that cannot withstand scrutiny is weaker than one which can. And in this case the attempt to restrict information from one source when there are many others including local surveillance is, besides being a fool's errand in itself, indicative of a fear that the security measures in place will not measure up to an actual attempt. It is also very much in the same vein as the "fig-leaf" faux security that has marked the "war on terror" in general; it is clearly a justified criticism.

How can you copyright a satellite photo of the earth? Since you're so far away, there's no selection of angle (other than "down"), so it seems to me these are similar to a photograph of any other 2-dimensional object, in other words, not copyrightable.

Take a look at this image (WTC, 6/30/2000). If your premise was correct, we'd only see the tops of the buildings. As it is, you can see the East and South sides (assuming North is to the top of the image).

Now, take a look at this image(WTC, 6/8/2002). Not only can you see the sides of the buildings, they are imaged at a different angle than the first picture; you see the North side, not the South.

If there were a way for the same satellite to take two images, one right after the other, it would be possible to make a stereographic image.

I do this all the time when traveling. I take two images of large, far-away objects (mountain range, river valley, seaside inlet). If I'm in a plane or train, I take two snapshots a few seconds apart; if walking, I usually go anywhere from a few hundred feet to half a mile.

When using either the proper viewing equipment (think "ViewMaster") or simply crossing your eyes when the images are placed next to each other, you get a 3D view of the scene.

Regardless, there is no way you can say these images are equivalent to a picture of a 2D object.

- Tony

How can you copyright a satellite photo of the earth? Since you're so far away, there's no selection of angle (other than "down"), so it seems to me these are similar to a photograph of any other 2-dimensional object, in other words, not copyrightable.

Take a look at this image (WTC, 6/30/2000). If your premise was correct, we'd only see the tops of the buildings. As it is, you can see the East and South sides (assuming North is to the top of the image).

Now, take a look at this image(WTC, 6/8/2002). Not only can you see the sides of the buildings, they are imaged at a different angle than the first picture; you see the North side, not the South.

If there were a way for the same satellite to take two images, one right after the other, it would be possible to make a stereographic image.

I do this all the time when traveling. I take two images of large, far-away objects (mountain range, river valley, seaside inlet). If I'm in a plane or train, I take two snapshots a few seconds apart; if walking, I usually go anywhere from a few hundred feet to half a mile.

When using either the proper viewing equipment (think "ViewMaster") or simply crossing your eyes when the images are placed next to each other, you get a 3D view of the scene.

Regardless, there is no way you can say these images are equivalent to a picture of a 2D object.

- Tony

Space Imaging announced today it will soon offer satellite ground station access and sell imagery from Indian Space Research Organization's (ISRO) newest satellite CARTOSAT-1 (P-5).

Space Imaging announced today it will soon offer satellite ground station access and sell imagery from Indian Space Research Organization's (ISRO) newest satellite CARTOSAT-1 (P-5).

http://www.spotimage.fr/html/_167_171_810_.php Launched 1986

Aster 15 m stereographic

http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov/content/03_data/01_Da ta_Products/DEM.PDF

First launched 1999. $3600 sq km cost US$60 and are public access.

IKONOS 1 m stereographic

http://www.spaceimaging.com/products/ikonos/stereo .htm

Perhaps I'm not understanding how the submitter is using the term "non-military", and not to wave Uncle Sam's flag too much, but offhand I can think of more than six US RS platforms/sensors:

EOS/Terra/MODIS http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Landsat ETM+ http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Landsat MSS (yes still going)
AVHRR http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/dataset/AVHRR/
GOES http://www.goes.noaa.gov/
ASTER http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov/

Not to mention US based commercial satellites:

IKONOS http://www.spaceimaging.com/
Quickbird URL:http://www.digitalglobe.com/

Very difficult: DigitalGlobe (then EarthWatch, with EarlyBird), Space Imaging (Ikonos), Orbimage (Orbview) all lost high resolution satellites before they became operational - these early high-res satellites were in fact based pretty much on off-the-shelf (but space qualified) parts. Landsat 6 was lost on launch and Landsat 7 suffered a crippling failure about a year ago. (BTW the EarlyBird launch on a Russian Cosmos, was said to have cost about $7 million, not 50 thousand). Having got it up there, and got it working, you then need a ground segment too, which is decidedly non-trivial.

EUA has giving more attention to Brazil on the Satellite Vehicle Launching, because the base of Alcântara is so near the Equator line reducing the use of gas to launch the roquets.

Two forms of commercial-grade aerial photos... taken from satellite, and taken from airplane.

It's relatively cheap and easy to get satellite photos of around 1 meter resolution for almost anywhere in the world. You can get them from a company like Space Imaging. Two caveats:

1) the US government will often purchase the rights to "black out" an entire region of coverage. It would be next to impossible to get current air photos of Iraq or Afghanistan, for example

2) It can be tricky to get satellite photos from a specific time. The satellite orbits the earth and takes pictures in long, narrow bands. So, you have to pretty much take what you can get when the satellite is overhead, and hope there isn't much cloudcover that day. So, it's difficult to get time-sensitive data from a satellite provider.

As far as air plane photos, they would likely subcontract out the operation to a company already in the US or Canada. This way, you can fly underneath the clouds, your resolution is generally higher, and you can pick the date/time of your imagery. The downside is the cost - you have to pay some joker with his own plane and some expensive camera gear to take the raw image. Then, if you want to actually use the imagery in a mapping or GIS environment, you have to bend the image into a map projection with the proper coordinates defined.

The only other option I can think of would be to acquire the data from previously existing historical sources such as the USGS digital orthophotos, LandSat, etc. These have varying degrees of quality, and vary in availability from state to state.

google for ikonos ... ikonos is used by http://www.spaceimaging.com/ and developed in India

"I would however demand compensation for the cost of a new launch and lost service and work on some kind of cooperation agreement so that I can deny service to agreed upon bad guys rather than just having my stuff shot down."

The US would gladly pay. In fact, whenever possible it would pay in advance.

Think, for example, about the US buying off all of IKONOS images of a country, to hide their movement from the enemy. Or, better yet but not very likely, "buying degradation" of the forthcoming Galileo positioning system .

Sadly, this system's rationale is only that it will be available in case of intentional degradation of the GPS signal, so these satellites are the most likey targets of any US "intervention".

The U.S government has always been able to do this with satellites licensed by them - it is called 'shutter control'. In the case of Afghanistan, they preferred to buy the output of Ikonos (the only Very High Resolution satellite then operating) not only to keep it from anyone else but because the data was actually useful - coverage is always a problem with satellite data. Not only that - I think you'll find private companies operating satellites like QuickBird and Ikonos will sell you exclusive rights to imagery if you are willing to pay enough.
You can't keep the imagery from the govt, however. And did you know they will not let those companies sell imagery over Israel or the occupied territories at less than 2 metres resolution, as against the 60 cm capabilities of QuickBird for example.
All this legislation does is prevent using the FoI Act to circumvent restrictions already in place - for US-based companies. And they're not worried about weather sats or Landsat, I'm sure...

You're right, it's not that bad. Although I wish the bill said that the government MAY withhold the requested data, instead of MUST. I think there will sometimes be things that they would be OK with releasing, but this law will now allow them to.

This proposal says that if the govt buy some pics from someone like http://spaceimaging.com/, they CANNOT release it in response to an FOIA request.

It does NOT say that CNN, NBC, Washington Post, or Joe Blow can't buy the data from the same place the govt got it. I seriously doubt that the news organizations rely on FOIA to get their satellite photos -- they can't wait that long. They buy from the source.

The only time journalists really need FOIA is to write a story about what the govt is up to: is the govt abusing its power, or wasting money, etc.

Top secret? Heck, such data is commercially available.

SPOT
Ikonos
Indian Remote Sensing

Or, if you insist on US Government products, see the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (which used to be the Defense Mapping Agency).

Top secret? Heck, such data is commercially available.

SPOT
Ikonos
Indian Remote Sensing

Or, if you insist on US Government products, see the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (which used to be the Defense Mapping Agency).

Terraserver is microsoft.

Try these guys instead.

Are high resolution satellite/aerial images available for other locations?

Yes. Do a google for your state/province and "GIS data". Most US states have some sort of FTP setup with elevation maps, aerial images, and topographic maps to download.

No, I don't expect to be able to buy hi-res images of Area 51, but was looking for my neighborhood.

Actually, I used to work for Space Imaging, and their conference demo was a 3D flyover of Area51 that had elevation and 1-meter resolution color imagery. To get a quickie on your neighborhood, check out Terraserver.

Also, are there ways of getting really nice poster prints of high resolution images?

www.mytopo.com

USGS extension office

Space Imaging has some famous stuff for sale as posters (pyramids, WTC site, etc.)

It is more significant to know the image resolution than the file size. This is represented by the number of ground units a single pixel takes up. 5 meter resolution refers to each pixel being 5 square meters (obviously). For mapping grade imagery, you want at least 5 meters. The standard is moving much closer to 1 meter as companies like Space Imaging start to dominate the market.

The performance is TERRIBLE on single large images, if you plan to use it at multiple zoom scales. It is much more efficient to have a spatially indexed series of seamless smaller images. This index, known as an image catalog in the GIS world, is basically a database with image coordinates and file names. When you zoom in to a given area on the map, the geographic coordinates are used to determine which images to display.

It is possible to compress the file size using such means as jpeg, but this is not thought of very highly in the mapping world. The ideal is to have a georeferenced (has a *.tfw header file that contains the coordinates for one of the image corners) tiff file, and to add compression using a package like MrSID. People who use air photos frequently will have two datasets: a compressed one and a standard tiff. It is much easier to change a map projection on an uncompressed image.

If you have some $, there is a software package called SDE that enables high performance raster display for mapping purposes. It works really well, but you are getting locked into a highly proprietary and expensive format.

Yeah, cause we totally have no idea where this top secret facility is or what it looks like. If Space Imaging has these kinds of pictures of it, I imagine the NSA was double checking the equations on the Chinese engineers' clipboards.

Sure, it looks big and impressive, but that's just not top-of-the-line anymore. If you're going to do serious networking, you'll need a bigger antenna!

I was more concerned about the whole "how do you hit the front of a 2 stories building with a plane and nothing else?"

the damage is limited to a hole the size of my living room

Did you see the whole section that was replaced? They completely replaced an entire section of the building.

This shows the damage was more than just the outer wall.
And this shows which part they demolished and later rebuilt.

the damage is limited to a hole the size of my living room

Did you see the whole section that was replaced? They completely replaced an entire section of the building.

This shows the damage was more than just the outer wall.
And this shows which part they demolished and later rebuilt.

A while back Salam Pax, an Iraqi citizen living in Baghdad, on his blog posted a link to this image from spaceimaging.com. Until yesterday he had up a little color-coded explaination of what everything in the picture is, but it's been taken down.

Anyway, everything at the bottom of the image, from the major highway down to the river, is officially a "presidential palace". I assume this is what everyone watching the news channels this morning saw get bombed/MOABed. Hopefully the highway acts as enough of a firebreak to keep the resultant flames from spreading to the residential buildings on the other side -- provided, of course, that the US is sufficiently moral to have not dropped bombs over there, too.

According to Salam the central palace building (the one with the blue dome and the semicircular courtyard out front) is/was quite beautiful, and he hoped that it'd be spared so that after the war it could be used as an academy or museum. Such is life...

Every time I go to that site I get scared that I'm reading the words of a dead man. I'll be so relieved when/if he posts about this latest round of attacks, just so I can know he's still there.

A while back Salam Pax, an Iraqi citizen living in Baghdad, on his blog posted a link to this image from spaceimaging.com. Until yesterday he had up a little color-coded explaination of what everything in the picture is, but it's been taken down.

Anyway, everything at the bottom of the image, from the major highway down to the river, is officially a "presidential palace". I assume this is what everyone watching the news channels this morning saw get bombed/MOABed. Hopefully the highway acts as enough of a firebreak to keep the resultant flames from spreading to the residential buildings on the other side -- provided, of course, that the US is sufficiently moral to have not dropped bombs over there, too.

According to Salam the central palace building (the one with the blue dome and the semicircular courtyard out front) is/was quite beautiful, and he hoped that it'd be spared so that after the war it could be used as an academy or museum. Such is life...

Every time I go to that site I get scared that I'm reading the words of a dead man. I'll be so relieved when/if he posts about this latest round of attacks, just so I can know he's still there.

If not, do researchers write C/C++ programs and use GMP or Matpack to solve math problems?"

Writing a robust, efficient, and accurate numerical analysis library is not something you do in a weekend. There's not much to improve upon with packages such as LAPACK and their kin: They've been proven to be accurate and reliable over years of use. There's really nothing to reinvent.

I'ver personally used LAPACK for digital terrain matrix (3D) processing of satellite stereo images and the mapping of spherical coordinates to and from various "flat-plane" projections generated by the IKONOS sats. There were simply no other viable alternatives to LAPACK in terms of speed and accuracy, and we certainly weren't arrogant enough to think we could write a better numerical analysis program.

If anything, regular programmers who would ever, for example, use PHP's fopen() for a proxy like the article described should be paid like H1Bs and school teachers -- about $35,000 a year, at the most.

Believe it or not, there are a few of us who have decided to take their $100,000 skills and work as teachers intent on bringing up a new generation of programmers for $35,000 a year. I'm one of them (yes, I've done some coding in my life, including much of the code that brings you color images from the IKONOS 1-meter satellites), and we are trying our damndest to prevent the likes of Mr. Bacarella from polluting the world of secure and robust programming with their silly views.

Someone has to keep fighting in the trenches...

For christ's sake they as a nation are freaking out because of the monkey man! [strangemag.com] attacking people.

That's no measure of anything. Last time I heard, many people in the United States were getting freaked out by a couple of baseball fields and tennis courts. (The pun here is that the picture of Area 51 is from a satellite. Not Indian, though.)

As for Indian techies, I'm sure you haven't heard the fact that the Cartosat 2 will have a panchromatic resolution of 1m; same as that of the current leader Ikonos.

Here's a gentle hint:- Science is peer-reviewable in scientific terms. Not racial.

India has a decent history (20+ years) of building and launching satellites. They have been helped along the way by the Russians to some extent, because the US refuses to sell them some of the advanced propulsion technology (like Cryo engines), which then they have to develop on their own.

All in all, more competition is good, I say.

India has a decent history (20+ years) of building and launching satellites. They have been helped along the way by the Russians to some extent, because the US refuses to sell them some of the advanced propulsion technology (like Cryo engines), which then they have to develop on their own.

All in all, more competition is good, I say.

How hard can the "challenge" be? There are cars there! Just take one of them into town when you get hungry!

http://www.spaceimaging.com/newsroom/attack_galler y.htm

Check out thespaceimaging web site for more satellite images, including 'before' and 'after' pictures of the WTC and the pentagon.

Check out thespaceimaging web site for more satellite images, including 'before' and 'after' pictures of the WTC and the pentagon.

Grumble... damn slashcode mangled my URLs... grumble...... here's the rant again, with proper URLs..
Those of you who think India is a novice at this stuff, take note of the following.
There is only 1 major company out there today which sells high quality satellite imagery, and that is Space Imaging. News organizations, governments, your favorite dictator, etc. buy hi-res imagery from them. Now, did you know that 4 of the 7 satellites used by Space Imaging are Indian satellites? Betcha didn't know that, didja! Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself.
India may be poor, Third World(tm), etc. etc. but it is making progress. Accept it, and we'll all get along just fine. No point wetting your bed at the sight of Indian rockets blasting off into space.

Grumble... damn slashcode mangled my URLs... grumble...... here's the rant again, with proper URLs..
Those of you who think India is a novice at this stuff, take note of the following.
There is only 1 major company out there today which sells high quality satellite imagery, and that is Space Imaging. News organizations, governments, your favorite dictator, etc. buy hi-res imagery from them. Now, did you know that 4 of the 7 satellites used by Space Imaging are Indian satellites? Betcha didn't know that, didja! Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself.
India may be poor, Third World(tm), etc. etc. but it is making progress. Accept it, and we'll all get along just fine. No point wetting your bed at the sight of Indian rockets blasting off into space.

Those of you who think India is a novice at this stuff, take note of the following.
There is only 1 major company out there today which sells high quality satellite imagery, and that is Space Imaging. News organizations, governments, your favorite dictator, etc. buy hi-res imagery from them. Now, did you know that 4 of the 7 satellites used by Space Imaging are Indian satellites? Betcha didn't know that, didja! Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself.
India may be poor, Third World(tm), etc. etc. but it is making progress. Accept it, and we'll all get along just fine. No point wetting your bed at the sight of Indian rockets blasting off into space.

Those of you who think India is a novice at this stuff, take note of the following.
There is only 1 major company out there today which sells high quality satellite imagery, and that is Space Imaging. News organizations, governments, your favorite dictator, etc. buy hi-res imagery from them. Now, did you know that 4 of the 7 satellites used by Space Imaging are Indian satellites? Betcha didn't know that, didja! Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself.
India may be poor, Third World(tm), etc. etc. but it is making progress. Accept it, and we'll all get along just fine. No point wetting your bed at the sight of Indian rockets blasting off into space.

Here is something that most of the posters in this thread probably don't know.
Space Imaging is the only (major?) company out there that is commercializing satellite imagery. You can buy satellite images of any spot on the earth for a small chunk'a change. Now, did you know that 4 out of 7 satellites used by SapceImaging to take these shots are Indian ? Checkout the Satellite Constellation page for more details; the IRS* satellites are all Indian.
During the Gulf War, all of the space imagery that you saw on the networks and newspapers was from Indian satellites.

Here is something that most of the posters in this thread probably don't know.
Space Imaging is the only (major?) company out there that is commercializing satellite imagery. You can buy satellite images of any spot on the earth for a small chunk'a change. Now, did you know that 4 out of 7 satellites used by SapceImaging to take these shots are Indian ? Checkout the Satellite Constellation page for more details; the IRS* satellites are all Indian.
During the Gulf War, all of the space imagery that you saw on the networks and newspapers was from Indian satellites.

www.spaceimaging.com (the first ones to sell commercial high-res imagery, very cool site with sat photo dowonloads)

A report by the Carnegie Endownment For Internatinal Peace
on the effects of commercial High-res.
Secrets for Sale

IKONOS First Image - Washington Monument

More images here

IKONOS First Image - Washington Monument

More images here

There are a few more high-res pictures buried on thier site, including some neat pics of the Olympic Stadium!

A little know secret of the Space Imageing site is that you can pretend you're the media and get MUCH better versions of the images.

http://www.spaceimaging .co m/ikonos/anniversary/media.htm

Like that pretty 1800x1800 Olympic stadium image? How about a 3090x4516 San Fran image? (watch out, it might crash Netscape)

Just watch out if you don't have a nice pipe. Let's see if spaceimaging can handle it.

How stupid does a company look when it doesn't give the URL of its own web site in a news release that mentions it? Here's the main site. Here's the 10 images.

How stupid does a company look when it doesn't give the URL of its own web site in a news release that mentions it? Here's the main site. Here's the 10 images.

www.spaceimaging.com (the first ones to sell commercial high-res imagery, very cool site with sat photo dowonloads)

A report by the Carnegie Endownment For Internatinal Peace
on the effects of commercial High-res.
Secrets for Sale

tcd004 Here's my Microsoft Parody, where's yours.

I found this pretty amusing-- I mean, a company that takes photographs of your house from space having a carefully-worded policy on what they're going to do with your freakin' cookies :-)