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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?
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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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.
.. 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.
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.
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
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...)
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.
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
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
wouldn't the area covered by the satellite (not necessarily Ikonos) depend entirely on its orbit, including the time spent over a given area?
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.
Ater dun said:
Unless aforementioned terrorists intend to drop a bomb out of a plane (or crash a plane into a downtown area), most of those maps aren't going to be terribly useful. I'd suspect most terrorists would find maps of the internals of a building, or plain old MAPSCO street maps, far more useful. (This is especially true in the case of most domestic terrorists, which are actually the larger source of potential terrorism in the US; a Planned Parenthood office isn't going to be easily identifiable as such by a mere aerial shot (well, unless you look for the building with a lot of people marching about with piccies of dismembered stillborn fetuses), while on MOST maps of downtown areas they tend to mark federal buildings clearly as landmarks.)
I'd actually think, oh, a building directory or blueprint, or even a AAA map would be more useful. The majority of terrorists are going to go for either car-bombs (a la World Trade Center or Oklahoma City) or for small devices which can be hidden easily (a la the Eric Rudolph bombings, or butyric acid attacks on family-planning centers that perform abortions). This is probably true even if they go for non-conventional arms.
The aims of military are different, in that with spy cameras they are usually looking for military installments; then, "smart weapons" or bombers are targeted towards those areas using the info from the maps. Not too many terrorists have ready access to ICBM's or bombers yet. :) (If and when they do, I suspect we'd have rather worse problems than, say, merely keeping high-resolution photographs of downtown areas away from them. :)
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
>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.
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
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.
...to show you what this thing is really capable of!
http://ww w.spaceimaging.com/gallery/ioweek/archive/iow1122Enjoy!
-AP
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. :)
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
uh yeah, and these urban terrorists couldn't just buy a street map?
I think your hat needs more tinfoil.
dave
Just yesterday I was thinking of buying some 'smart drugs' to improve my memory. I'm sending them straight to /. instead - you covered this when Space Imaging launched their website several months ago! Maybe the Slash code should automatically search and suggest stories that could be the same whenever you make a submission? Or was it your aim to cover someone else's coverage of a story you had already run, to show how far behind the competition is?
Or is it OK to rerun stories over and over because there are so many new readers that haven't seen what was posted anything more than four months ago?
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.
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.
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