Slashdot Mirror
Sneaky Satellite Photos Available Online
Delboy writes "Here's an article from BBC News about a company called Space Imaging which will point their satellite at an area of the planet that you request, take a 1 metre resolution picture and then e-mail it to you the next day, check out this link to read more."
Most of the eastern US, I believe is available. Last time I checked, at least.
Neat stuff. My grandfather is an aerial chemical applicator (read: spray plane pilot) in North Dakota. I have fond memroies of photocopied, aerial section maps. The resolution was suprisingly good, but nothing would be a 1 meter resolution.
But, say, some Columbian drug lord wanted to guage build up of DEA forces in area Foo. He could go through a proxy, but how deeply would the company check backgrounds for ppossible nefarious uses?
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
What about Pluto?
to keep this as content free as possible.
Great man, now I guess everyone's going to see where I grow my weed. No peace for the wicked!
This is, of course, completely useless.
Then again, in a community of people who worship Legos and swallow fradulent pseudo-science by the bucketload since it sounds cool, I'm sure there will be more than a few takers.
P.S. Last Post?
So will they point that sattelite and get pics of that little airforce base 100 miles north of Las Vegas for me?
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We could see the new models of cars before they're tested on the open road, and could spy on the filming of the next Star Wars movie.
Think of the potential! /. code will look like /. next
You can learn:
1) What toys the boys bought with their IPO money
2) What the next version of
3) Who will by
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
The solution to all our problems is clear. We all get together and create a giant poster with the DeCSS code printed on it in huge letters (enough so that 1m resolution could read them), put it out in the middle of a field somewhere, and have this thing take a picture. I suggest that this picture then be made the official new slashdot logo.
1. obtain day job to finance small investment in classified photos of various installations in various countries.
2. find small, militant country looking for someone to start a fight with.
3. offer to help country out, for a price
4. after selling photos, obtain great two-for-one deal on nuclear missiles from a certain former communist country
5. obtain blast proof bunker and large amounts of supplies
6. sit back and enjoy the show
I have no idea what a 1 m. photograph would look like. But it would be fun if they said the picture would be taken between 10 and 10:30 EST and you could go out with a group of friends and hold a big sign up. or maybe not... just letting my mind wonder...
Great! I'd like shots of the following locations, as well as their surrounding areas:
115-49'00"W 37-14'00"N
115-44'00"W 37-38'30"N
115-51'30"W 37-7'30"N
115-47'30"W 37-16'30"N
(For the curioius, those Latitude/Longiude numbers are in the vicinity of Nellis Air Force base, the area of Rachel Nevada, Groom Lake, and surrounding parts.)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
You show us everything you've got
You keep on trolling while the grits get hot
You mod us down we'll troll you crazy
You say you want to be petrified
Lacey Chabert is a fucking sweet ride
You mod us down, we'll troll you crazy
And you, keep on flaming, you keep on flaming...
I....wanna rock and troll all night...
And moderate every day!
I....wanna rock and troll all night...
And masturbate every day!
You keep on saying that you'll Meept! for a while
Ninja pancakes are just my style
You mod us down, we'll troll you crazy
Lamers like yourself can't ever score
CmdrTaco is a dirty whore
You mod us down, we'll troll you crazy
And you, keep on flaming, you keep on flaming...
I....wanna rock and troll all night...
And moderate every day!
I....wanna rock and troll all night...
And masturbate every day!
I find this idea could be potentially very harmful in several ways. While the whole novelty of taking pictures of world landmarks is cute, I do see some possible problems.
First, I wouldnt think it ridiculous for the service to be used for the purpose of plotting terrorist or spy attacks. Considering the military has probably used this technology to map out and survey areas, I could forsee some wannabe terrorists purchasing an aerial map of a large metropolitan city in order to determine where to place a bomb for maximum impact and what to use as an escape route. True, the photos arent detailed enough to be dangerous, but on large scale area, it might be problematic.
Also, I could forsee this used in the corporate realm for espionage. As a prior poster mentioned jokingly, one could spy on movie screenings and car testings. However I wouldn't be surprised if some companies started investing in satelite pics to scout out the developments of competitors (especially in the defense industry, auto industry, construction industry, and the like).
Finally, this may be paranoid of me, but I think eventually the technology would get better to the point that personal spying could occur. It doesn't seem realistic, but it is a potential threat to privacy. Imagine being able to spy on your neighbor's daily activities, especially considering the possibility of blackmail or libel as a result of pictures. Maybe the tech could even be used to plan out hits by mapping out the "target's" house and daily activities.
Yeah I know, this all seems far-fetched, but those are potentially serious issues that could be brought up by the use of what is essentially commericialized spy technology. Just a few thoughts
because its running sco and they dont have enough licenses!!!! the cost of putting a satelite into orbit im sure wasnt even close to what the sco licenses cost!!
microsoft is easy bashing fodder, but sco is the real enemy. do your part to destroy sco. remember, sco hates you.
Quick, Honey! Cover the skylight before your parents find out about this company! :-)
Actually the resolution of 1m is not too invasive, but you might be able to track vehicle movements, etc. Remember when that Yacht was lost in the race around the south pole? I'll bet this satellite could have helped in the search.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
.. not all of them, at least.
:-)
If you're looking at areas over the United States, you're looking at aerial photography, not satellite images. Specifically, they are DOQs (Digital Orthophoto Quadrangles.) This is aerial photography that is georegistered and then terrain corrected (a digital elevation model is applied to the data to correct for relief.) The spatial resolution is 1 meter, which certainly puts it on par with Ikonos.
Of course, there's a big difference between satellite data and aircraft data: assuming that you've got the listening infrastructure (antennas and ground stations available worldwide) or a big-ass solid state recorder, acquiring satellite data allows you to assemble more or less a complete archive of data for a selected region or regions. With aerial photography, there's obviously a lot more involved, and clearly you can't have coverage of a single place on Earth updated every (say) eight days! (The exact time period would depend on the orientation of the spacecraft's orbit.) Most of the DOQs provided by the USGS are several years old; very few have "newer versions."
Oh, and if you're going to be continuously acquiring satellite data, shitloads of storage capacity helps.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
If Bill G. (or anyone with sufficient funds) wanted to, he could watch anyone, anytime for as long as he wanted just by buying aritime on a service like this. That could be a powerful tool. Maybe too powerful. There is no more such thing as privacy, kids.
is some aerial photographs of Natalie Portman smearing raisins on her chest and doing the macarena!
wonder if this will be useful in aiming my missiles at sco. i hope so because sco sucks.
it is a tough job sometimes.
they need to just mount the missiles on the satelite. that would make it so much easier. sco = puke
The article forgot to mention how useful this satellite imaging service is to ecological research. Quite understandable, really, since we tend to get slotted into the queue far below other "Big Money" science. There are many projects at our department, however, for which satellite-quality information of large-scale geographic patterns is very useful: for example, mapping out habitat (vegetation) availability and clinal variation of temperature, etc.
In fact, a good friend of mine in the Serengeti is using a different satellite technology (GIS -- sorry, but I forget what the acronym translates to) to study the foraging and dispersal behaviour of lions. The take home message is that this is REALLY useful stuff and that there are a lot of us that can't wait for more of those birds to go up.
When they specify the detection of a 1-metre square area, does this mean that a lawn chair would show up as a big honking off-white 1m2 pixel?
I think that'd be neat. Cause if I could afford to, I'd snapshot the geek compound.. Taco/Hermos, whats your GPS coords?
Update - Just found some prices... mmm, very expensive, will have to explore more to get a better idea. If someone figures the prices out clearly, post them please.
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I use to have a funny sig, but slash cut it off, and I forgot what the punchline was.
I do believe this was covered here: http://slashdot.org/articles/99/09/05/1425217.shtm l
But not uranus! Seriously, they pointed this thing out at the local celestial bodies during the test phase. Those pictures are on-line and available for purchase.
Actually, about 2 years ago when I was reading the sci.space.* newsgroups regularly there was a reference to a french satellite that was taking pictures (resolution not as good however) and keeping them in a database. They had a web page and you could punch in some coordinates and it would pull up the most recent photo in its database of that area.
Someone did type in the Area 51 coordinates and when the photo came up you could see a runway. Not much else though due to poorer resolution.
I just checked some of my old bookmarks and I couldn't find the link. I'll look some more later.
Ignore Alien Orders
Maybe someone should purchase some pictures of Bill Gates at his big fine house. Or maybe he could be caught outside making a deal to take away some user rights.
The sample images are very impressive. It's terrific to see that yet another space age technology is available for everyone.
The commercial availability of these kinds of imaging changes so many things. A few off the top of my head:
This last aspect will give world governments more accountability about geopolitical "hot spots". When Joe Sixpack (or, at least, Joe Wealthy Sixpack or Earth First! or Greenpeace or International Amnesty) can produce images better than the ones that caused the Cuban Missile Crisis, it will become very hard for dishonest governments (such as our own!) to get away with certain kinds of lies. Of course, the illuminati aren't particularly stupid and will undoubtedly try to regulate or outlaw this stuff.
In that light, the ``snapper'' of the BBC article is intriguing -- apparently the U.S. government has already outlawed certain kinds of spaceborne photography of Israel? Sheesh, you'd think people would eventually figure out that you can't put the genie back in the bottle. (You turn your back on congress for one session...)
You can get some powerful seeds and just grow it in you basement and have enough for all your zonked amigos.
http://mapserver.esri.com/si/html/main.htm ("browse our imagery" link) says "You need Internet Explorer 3.02 or Netscape version 3 or newer!" in response to every attempt to enter something, www.spaceimaging.com consists of two boxes that run Windows, some links from them point to "bare" IP address of the same server, http://www.spaceimaging.com/level2/level2buy.htm has "We're still working on this section." message... lame, especially compared to the technology involved in actually getting images.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Traditionally a unix domain, the business of aquisition, geo-referencing, rectification, enhancement, projection, storage and display of geo(data/imagery) has been migrating towards NT.
The file sizes are worth pondering, single full colour scanned aerial photos are approx 400Mb, composite colour aerial's of a reasonable sized city are about 32Gb in size, compressable to under 10 Gb ( & preferably in a manner that allows rapid server access to any sized region at any zoom level ).
The colour imagery and DEM( digital elevation model ) for a large state can easily top a terrabyte.
Add to this a database of locations, labels, vectors, populations, demographics, land-use, etc ...
( An "OpenContentDistributed"(tm) database perhap's )
some stuff that's about:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/topo/gltiles.shtml
http://www.earthetc.com
If Bill G. (or anyone with sufficient funds) wanted to, he could watch anyone, anytime for as long as he wanted just by buying aritime on a service like this.
.. you're now unrolling tape over a slightly different area of the basketball. Depending on how your "orbit" is engineered, you're probably overlapping a small percentage of a previous swath. Keep this up, and eventually you'll have covered the entire basketball with tape (or nearly all of it.) At this point you start over.
No, he couldn't. Maybe you've been watching too much Enemy of the State? It would be awfully difficult for a spacecraft moving thousands and thousands of miles an hour to monitor you sunbathing naked in the backyard in real-time. The spacecraft images what it is passing over. Once it's past, it's gone until the next go-round.
I don't know anything about the orbital design of Ikonos, but a good analogy is this: take a basketball and a roll of masking tape, and then start unrolling the tape across the surface of the ball, starting at the "south pole" and heading north. The width of the tape represents the swath, or the total width of the imaged area. Once you get to the north pole and back down to the south, keep on unrolling
Again, a lot of this depends on the design of the spacecraft's orbit (which I know nothing about), but that's the general idea.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Is this the new preferred method of trolling? It's similar to the Crash Eschelon project... put out enough rubish that's not obviously rubish so that they waste processing power on useless stuff.
The ikonos satillite takes 0.8 meter pictures raw. Via the projection to a map process, they lose a little bit and so the call it "1 meter". Either by congressional law or FCC/State Department licensing or gentelmen's agreement, American remote sensing companies won't be taking hi-res pictures of certain areas. One of the places is Area 51; another is Israel/Palestine. India, France and Israel plan to launch their own hi-res satillites within the next few years.
Under current US Supreme Court precedent, it doesn't violate the fourth amendment protections against unreasonable searches to make aerial photographs (from a plane) of someone's backyard that has a huge fence around it and is concealed from view on the ground. ( California v. Ciraolo ). Now imagine how much more powerful/dangerous satellites like this could be in the hands of law-enforcement.
Sure there are plenty of satellites out there in the hands of the government, but most of those are unavailable for mundane applications potentially inconsistent with national security. But one of the rationales in Ciraolo was that the policeman taking the photos from the plane was in publicly accessible space, and that can hardly be said of most spy satellites. But if this particular satellite is available for public use, then does that change the picture? I hope not -- privacy is a scarce enough quality as it is.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Geographical Information Satellite, though I am more than likely wrong ;)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
I think the major danger would be that hostile countries could use the images for targetting missiles on Israeli defense installations.
The US has a huge geographic database that is used for programming terrain following cruise missiles.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
And you thought they were crop dusting. Wake up. The man *knows* exactly how your neighborhood streets are layed out and how the elms are doing.
wouldn't the area covered by the satellite (not necessarily Ikonos) depend entirely on its orbit, including the time spent over a given area?
You've been able to buy these kind of images from a number of sources for several years now, though Space Imaging's pricing seems to be better. The resolution isn't really that impressive, so I don't really think privacy is much of an issue; at that scale, everything will just look like boxes...The main appeal seems to be the time frame (though I'm not sure how they can have pictures the next day if the revisit time is 2.9 days), though to actually search for anything over a large area would cost a lot of money with these guys (at least you could save on the software costs by using open source remote sensing tools: http://www.remotesensing.org)
For those looking for Area 51, it's been moved to north west Texas, now called area 6452 or something like that. I think I saw that in Popular Science a year or so ago.
Hmmm... 1 meter shot of Aurora. Sweet.
Satellite images can be used for good or evil. Like for scientific research and information. We need info on the climate and what man is doing to the planets ecology. Also it is good for knowing when governments are commiting atrocities. On the bad side terrorists or governments who want to do us harm can use the images to fight our troops or for terrorist attacks. While there needs to be freedom of information, there also needs to be some way to limit access to the images in some situations.
The engineering systems are IRIX, Linux and Solaris. We even have an indestructable piece of crap VMS system. Of course the slaves use NT (Real Networks and Arcview actually work on it, sometimes).
Anyone know the lattitude and longitude of any of them private nudist colonies?
:)
How about Pamela Anderson's backyard?
Environmental research my ass
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
And if the Soviet sat images of Area 51 can and have been made public (republished in fucking Time magazine no less), why would the US be able to block a British company from doing the same?.
what is all this ezek, deut, num stuff? canterbury tales, right? what in the hell is this being posted to slashdot for? if i want to read chaucer i'll grab it off of my bookshelf. now stop posting this crap, thanks.
Dr. Kevorkian could have a new euthanasia device consisting of a GPS unit and a wireless webpad, simply key in your co-ordinates to commit suicide!
Ohhh thats bad taste!!!
Francis Hwang
Do domain names matter?
American companies can't offer better resolution of certain areas that is availabe via foreign sources. The Ruskies provide really lame 2 meter photographs. The actually use film and parachute it down into Siberia. So that's the best Americans can provide of "sensitive" areas. They can provide the 1-meter photos of anywhere else. BTW, the Frencies do 10 meter stuff and the indians do 5 meter. The french 10 meter is 8 pixels and the indian 5 meter is 6 pixels.
The law basicly sucks. I can understand why the US prohibits Area 51 for now; but why make a special case for just Israel? Hmmmm, maybe it's because Israel is launching their own fleet of hi-res imaging birds ???? They can't stand the competition!
Like the missile silos or the numerous nuclear power plants (or absence thereof if they get their plutonium from the good old US of A).
Remember, they officially don't have nuclear weapons...
Yep, the lawn chair would be big enough to alter the detected pixel value ... if the color is differnt enough than the background. You can actually see dots of people out side the Smitsonian in DC and Tien An Mien Square in Beijing.
Well, I live on the east coast and I'm a minor. I have no idea whats on a nude beach so I need to find out. Does anybody have coordinates for a nude beach? Thanks!
Elijah Chancey www.elijahsadventure.com nomadic IT consultant, bicycling across america "all that you touch / and all
They actually have stuff that works but wont put it out to the public. morons!
"It would be awfully difficult for a spacecraft moving thousands and thousands of miles an hour to monitor you sunbathing naked in the backyard in real-time." Obviously from what you said you know nothing about orbiting spacecraft. How do you think GPS sats work? they are in a geosynicronous orbit meaning they remain over the same posistion on the earth all the time. They have to in order to use them for navagation and other readings (speed, elevation etc.) you are thinking of a geostationary orbit in which the sat dosen't move but the earth does (giving the apearence of movement.). So in a sence yes what happend in enemy of the state can be done and continues to be done by the US gov. (just not to that magatude) all the technology and appalcations shown in the movie are a reality today.
I know its from ms and all but I've spent hours looking at terraserver. For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, ms has a massive collection of sattelite imagry in a database that you can browse like a map. Very cool, now see if area 51 is blocked out...
I seem to remember an article in the New York Times a few weeks ago on some images this satellite took of the North Koreanmissle base (responsible for the launch of a wayward test launch that was sighted formerly sighted over Japan,) under private direction. What seemed a simple diversion became a coup d'etat, as the US had formerly played up the importance and dangerousness of this missle site as "severe." The pictures, which were anlyzed by the American Federation of Scientists (?), revealed a launch base so dilapidated, it was missing only a giant rubber band with which to complete missions; point being: when the information and capabilities reside solely in the hands of the few and powerful, the interpretation is solely theirs also. For too long we have been reliant on the propaganda offered to play up American social fears to the monetary benefit of big government. Next stop, perhaps more pertinent? Nuclear test sites in India and Pakistan might be worth a penny.
Spacing Imaging has been covered in the press for months, e.g., this article in U.S. News & World Report (the online version doesn't have the same impact as the print article, which had a beautiful, full-page, 1-meter image of Washington D.C.). The company was also featured in the N.Y. Times Sunday January 16th, etc., etc.
>There is no more such thing as privacy, kids.
Sure there is - just do all your outdoor activities under a big umbrella.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Holy Shit. On the main site, click "Media Only", and then agree to the terms and what not and you can get access to some awesome pics:
Beijing
Cairo
Manhattan
Rome
Sanaa
San Francisco
Santorini
Sapporo
Taipei
Tokyo
Yeah, I agree to the terms. Uh-huh, I work for the Times.
ITS BECAUSE AMERICA IS A FUCKING JEW LOVING SHIT COUNTRY!
Obviously from what you said you know nothing about orbiting spacecraft.
.. :-)
Gee, I work with them daily, but hey
How do you think GPS sats work? they are in a geosynicronous orbit meaning they remain over the same posistion on the earth all the time.
My dearest Anonymous Coward, would you be so kind as to calculate the altitude at which a spacecraft must be in order to be in a geostationary orbit? If you don't wish to read ahead in the thread, I'll tell you: it's about 36,000 kilometers. And yes, that works just fine and dandy for communications satellites. But for spacecraft intended for remote sensing, such as Ikonos, you need to be far lower. (Ikonos is at 675 km.) If you can build an instrument array that functions with a spatial resolution of 1 meter from a distance of 36,000 km, I'm sure there are many folks who would like to talk to you.
So in a sence yes what happend in enemy of the state can be done and continues to be done by the US gov.
There's a conspiracy theorist in every crowd, I guess.
The GPS satellites are not in geosynchronous orbits. The orbit is 26,560 km above the center of the earth with an orbital period of 12 sidereal hours. If you watch the spacecraft tracking display on a GPS receiver, you will see the satellites rise and set.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Geez, I wish my brother would stop posting this stuff.
You guys love to talk about how information wants to be free. I'd suggest a site, or many sites, are started, where people pay for these images and then post them free for others.
Especially those $10 ones. Think of it, you could have a huge archive of pics from all around the world. I think it'd be sweet. So who's gonna do it?
Also, what's the legality involved here? If you pay for the image, do you have the right to distribute it to others?
Just like our CPU's keep getting better, our ability to perform satellite recon will also get better. I don't know but I don't think that there is an available technology to screw up this capability. At least for computers there is encryption. I don't have anything to hide but I'm concerned about privacy issues.
I guess for now, all one can do is make it public knowledge about when this type of satellite is overhead. For me, I'm going to put my statue of NP naked and petrified in my back yard. If infrared sensors/imaging is available, then I'll pour hot grits down my pants. There! Something useful advice gained by the trolls of /.
how old can this stuff get?
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Well, the resolution of IKONOS is new, but space photographs of many places --- yes, including Area 51 --- have been available from many years.
Space Imaging --- previously EOSAT --- has handled Landsat imagery since the mid-1980s, when Landsat was "privatized" (read: "paid for with taxpayer money and then given away to wealthy aerospace firms.") They raised the Landsat prices to the point where Congress enacted a law (in 1992, I think) to pay for flying a new Landsat not under Space Imaging's control, and distribute the results in the public domain.
The Space Imaging Landsat CDs on my desk are marked "Trade Secret", with a notation that their use is governed by a license agreement.
Landsat has borne four sensors: the RBV or Return Beam Vidicon, with 80m resolution and which never got much use; the MSS or Multispectral Scanner, with four bands of 80m resolution; the TM or Thematic Mapper sensor, with 7 bands with 30m resolution; and the latest satellite, Landsat 7, whose data is available from the USGS's EROS Data Center for cost (presumably a few hundred dollars for a roughly 7000x7000 "scene", although I haven't been able to find it on their Web site yet) bears the ETM+ or Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus sensor, which is roughly equivalent to the TM sensor, but with an extra "panchromatic" band with 18.9 meter resolution.
About the Landsat-7 data: it's public-domain once you get it, so you can do whatever you like. If someone sets up a web site with all L7 data available free to the public, the cost to the USGS per image provided will probably go up --- they'll be providing only one copy of each image. They might be unhappy about this.
About geosynchronous orbits: the Landsat 7 satellite flies at 705 km altitude. Geosynchronous, or geostationary, satellites are flown at 35,000 km, 50 times higher. (That's the way the math works out --- if you want to go around the Earth once every 24 hours, you need to fly that high.) If the Landsat 7 ETM+ sensor were flown in a geostationary orbit, its multispectral bands would provide 1500-meter resolution instead of 30-meter resolution. The GOES satellites that provide weather maps fly in geosynchronous orbits; they have 4-km resolution on most bands and 1-km resolution on one of them.
An additional difficulty is that half of the work --- one direction of scanning --- is taken care of by the Landsat's motion over the earth, giving us a simpler and more reliable satellite. (Landsat 5, still flying, is 15 years old.) So a geostationary surveillance satellite would need either a much bigger sensor array, or more mechanical parts to do a second direction of scanning.
In response to some of the more paranoid posts: given the difficulty of surveillance from a geostationary orbit and the coverage times from the unclassified satellites (Landsat-7 covers the whole earth every 16 days --- so it covers any given spot almost twice a month), it is highly unlikely that the NRO or any other agency is able to track you minute by minute, or probably even day by day, by satellite.
(I do not have access to any classified information on this topic.)
Space Imaging also handles one of the Indian Remote Sensing satellites, if I recall correctly.
Landsat data is good enough that you can distinguish different kinds of crops --- so those guys you know who grow their weed under fluorescents in their basements aren't just being paranoid.
Other satellites that provide similar information are the French SPOT satellites and the EOS satellites.
The hot new tech in this department is something called "imaging spectroscopy", or "hyperspectral imaging", which potentially provides much more detailed information by collecting hundreds of bands of information. (What brand of paint are you using on your car? What is this soil made of? Where in this minefield is the earth disturbed? etc.) I believe there is now one experimental hyperspectral sensor in orbit.
"Remote sensing" is the name for this whole field of study. I believe rst.gsfc.nasa.gov has a superb tutorial on the subject.
The damn "no score +1 bonus" button is too close to "post anonymously." The above reply is mine.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
...to show you what this thing is really capable of!
http://ww w.spaceimaging.com/gallery/ioweek/archive/iow1122Enjoy!
-AP
I'm going to have to find a better place to park Airwolf.
A few years ago I was on the Nevada Test Range where they did the atomic testing, and Area 51 is a part of it's northern area. Anyway, I was in a welcome building getting my pass to go on base(to pick up some stuff I bought at an auction:trucks, misc broken parts, a tractor. Don't ask), and I see a sat photo of the whole area. Nice 3' x2' photo. I got to see a nice 5 mile or so(measuring with my pen against the scale) runway, and a few buildings in that general vincinity. I also saw the roads running all over the base, and only one of them went over the mountains into the Area 51. Unlike the rest of the base, where there were roads running all over the place.
Now for posting this, will I get a knock on my door? I sure hope not, I didn't sign a non disclosure agreement or anything.....
What they NEGLECTED to do, however, is either:
(a) JavaScript it so you can't actually get focus inside the textarea to change things, or
(b) verify that the license agreement "matches" what it should when you click to "Agree"
You could theoretically change the agreement to say "Space Imaging agrees to grant the downloader exclusive rights to this image in perpetuity. Any future sales of this image by Space Imaging will incur a royalty payment due the downloader in the amount of 25% of the collected monies". If they, in turn, agree to that license (by sending you the poster/image/etc.), then it should be considered legally binding.
Moral of the story: Let's paste the GPL in there, and have a field day. :)
Why do you need there service you can go to the terraserver project and pratically get the same quality of satellite imagery for free. Check 'em out at Terraserver.com. Its really quite impressive to zoom in and look at your "house" from space.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
After searching far and wide (I even checked on floppies) I found the URL. I don't know if it will work for you, because friends have told me that they occasionally get locked out being asked for a password, but here it is:
It's called DALI.
Use it, but don't abuse it. :-)
If it gets slashdotted they'll probably cut us off.
Ignore Alien Orders
It's interesting what freedoms we surrender in the name of technology. Again, not complaining, I just find it interesting.
With other satellite companies sending similar projects up into orbit, the prices for the service ought to come down. A neat use for this would be to take aerial photos of a long enough event (one that lasted all day or longer), like some large sports tournament or something like that.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Granted, this is nothing close to the technology that modern spy satellites have (probably greater than 10 centimeter resolution). Who knows, maybe much greater.
Still, it's only a matter of time before this is used in some way that endangers the national security of some country. I mean, is this company going to be informed by every country that creates a 'classified' area? Will there be formal no-spy-zones announced by every country on Earth? What happens the first time that it accidentally photographs something that gets a team of DEA agents slaughtered or worse, tips the hand of something far more serious and causes the deaths of thousands of ethnic minorities or something?
As for real-time satellite observation, the 25-year old Keyhole satellite program was able to monitor evens on the ground in near real time, I hate to think of what they are capable of doing now. I recently saw an interview with a former CIA employee who was commenting on SR-71 photographs and said something to the effect of 'The images we used to view from the Blackbird were so detailed that no only could you look down on a golf course and see who was putting, but you could tell what brand of gold ball they were using. And that was 30 years ago.'
Should this interfere with or threaten a US military (or intelligence) op, I don't doubt for one moment that this baby would somehow, uhm, vanish...we've had ASAT missiles since '85. :)
How about using something like 'magic water' to mark personal property (for example cars). Could the imaging systems not use filters to home in. Some conspiracy theorists might not like it, but if you've got nothing to hide ...
I wonder if the US has alreaddy blocked these people, and the other Satellite people, from photographing Area 51.
How expensive?
take a triptonica to subthunk
This is a troll parade
You know we have to do it
We like to get out
And make the children boo it
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Nascantur in Admiratione. (Let them be born in Wonder)
Hmmm a little contrived i think. Keep working on it.
Still, its good for a sig. They`re all shit anyway (what *is* the point of a sig, anyway?)
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 :-)
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
There are pictures on the Federation of American Scientists of the North Korean missile test site at No-dong. These show what IKONOS system is capable of and also seem to show that North Korean capability in this area is quite limited despite media hysteria. Something the US administration has presumably known all along.
Take a look at
http://terraserver.microsoft.com/
Yeah, it's a Micro$oft site, but the images are pretty impressive. The coverage is currently quite patchy, but some of the photos are almost as impressive as the sample photos from this article.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
We did a county wide project in the midwest a few years ago to lay parcel maps on aerial photos with very high resolution; you can tell which people have pools or decks which aren't listed in the assesor's database.
By overlaying the national wetlands inventory or corresponding state GIS information on top of a aerial or sattelite photo, you can easily tell who has been building in a wetland.
We're working with an agency in CA to map rice fields for purposes of mosquito control. Normally vegetation and crop identification requires infrared, however with rice you can use black and white photography when the rice field is flooded. A few thousand dollars of sat imagery will save them many times the labor costs in surveying.
For most users the advantage of this kind of imagery is lower cost vs conventional survey or aerial photography. For some applications that you mention (photos of war zones) you simply can't get the information any other way.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
All in all, the landsat 5 costs less than landsat 7. Yes the user pays more, but society pays less.
... in Jordanian airspace and use a Polaroid Camera to get better pictures. Or one of the Palestinian garbage men could scout it out. The reason Israel doesn't want hi-res pictures avaialable is because they are launching their own fleet of hi-res satillites ... why have comptition if you can have the US Congress restrain 'em?
Check this out everybody...
According to these satellite images from Terraserver, Area 51 really does not exist... There's just a big black hole there.
I'm sorry Agent Smith, was I not supposed to see that?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
For the record: the TerraServer imagery *is* from the Digital Ortho QuarterQuad program, not satellite imagery, save for a few demosntrations they had. The project with USGS ran out some time ago. USGS is not likely to pump money into it again, although you may see them setting up their OWN terraserver some day.
. htm) has spent a lot of time, effort and money doing all this, and placing the most current datasets in the public domain.
The DOQQ photography is dependent on the partnering and additional funding provided by the States. In Texas, for example, the DOQ imagery is in color IR, so land-use/land-classification work can proceed. The USGS standard base is black-and-white high-res. The standard altitude is 30,000 feet. Registration is done, these days, using GPS in a kinematic survey mode, which provides accuracies similar to (although theoretically better than) the older registration marks on the ground. Realize also that
It currently takes 4 years to fly, process, register, rectify, catalog, archive and release the State of Texas' DOQQs. The State (http://www.tnris.state.texas.us/DigitalData/dows
Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by tenure.
It sort of works but all I see are weird pictures of ants and melted pocket watches.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
The particular technology he is refering to is Geographical Information Systems (GIS). GIS is not a satellite technology, but more like a cartographical technology. It is a database which stores information specific to the points in a map and can overlay those maps for comparative studies. Satellites images are often used in GIS systems for acquiring data. Some of the applications of GIS are, flood damage estimation, harvest forecast for different crops, land use/land cover mapping for forestry, etc.
The Ikonos satellite is a terrific platform for remote sensing. But you're not going to get pictures of Area 51 out of it. :) The US government has shutter control over the satellite, meaning that they can veto acquisition requests that go over their bases or troops in the field. Scientists do not like these restrictions, obviously.
m l 7 56/17.htm
Some URLs talking about the Ikonos Shutter Control:
http://www.spie.org/web/oer/may/may99/cover1.ht
http://www.worldlink.co.uk/articles/08091999111
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Any HAMS out there know the frequencies of said birds like the IKONOS, and perhaps a protocol?
I think it'd be great to receive the data direct from the sattelite and decode it yourself - skip the fee, of course, you lose the ability to tell them what area to take a picture of, but it'd still be cool to collect the images to see what others are looking at....
Any links to such a scenario?
Hams?
What bugs me most about this is that Congress thinks they can legislate such "dangerous behavior" out of existience. I have news for Congress: Tennessee's #1 cash crop is illegal. Translation: Congress' power to legislate behavior is exactly squat.
Which is as it should be.
Mere posession of information (DeCSS) should not be illegal. If I want to go have a spysat take pictures if the Israeli version of Area 51, MY GOVERNMENT has no business holding a gun to my head and telling me I can't.
Now, if I go use that pic to lob a SCUD missile in on the runway, the Israelis have the right to make me face a firing squad. But the UNITED STATES fscking GOVERNMENT has no business poking its nose in my hard drive, period, end of sentence.
Assuming, of course, they can make heads or tails of it, or want to bother devoting a supercomputer to a small-time maverick like me... :)
For those of you who need to find the Long/Lat of a place in order to use this thing try this site:
http://www.mit.edu:8001/geo
It will find longitude and latitude of cities, specific addresses, and various other things.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
...as to how long it will be until someone tries for a photo of the Nellis AFB/'Area 51' zone?
Assuming the bird even goes over that area, and that the company is crazed enough to risk a visit from Da Feds by allowing such a shot...
You could spell out someones name with contrasting elements, maybe dark logs on white snow, or a whole bunch of people laying down in a field of grass. Or a huge connect the dots game...
...having the ability to not only view but to request these sort of images is really scary.
I knew that major Goverments had the ability to do this...but to have any Joe on the street request this info is mind-blowing.
I guess living adjacently to a military base actually has its downsides sometimes...
Good luck. All communications with Ikonos are heavily encrypted.
What about these possibilities:
We should always consider all the implications of something before we praise it.
bun-fhuinneog agam!
these are *not* radar images. the ikonos pan band is very close to the range perceived by the human eye.
:-)
'k I'm lazy.
/s (or better yet, encode them into diffs against the last second's pic) you might be able to get a pretty good surveillance of one part of the earth.
Does anyone know what the period of orbit of this thing is? A couple of hours? What is the bandwidth of picture download and what res are they? How quickly can it change orbits (can it, or does it merely precess around the earth?) Is there only one or several.
If there were several and they were able to download a pic
Back in '95 I worked at E-Systems on the ground
station software (my particular piece was image
viewers). It was my favorite project in all of
my 18-year career. They were trying to do it
right - OO development with OO CASE tools,
incremental development, analysis, design, and
code reviews, paying attention to the CMU SEI
capability and maturity model. Fun project.
radiks kouriers
:)
(anyone read snow crash?)
...what's really going on at the Microsoft campus?
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson