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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."
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.
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...)
The Ikonos satellite data (see here) shows that it orbits at an altitude of 681 kilometers / 423 miles. Why so close? Because the closer to the earth, the higher the resolution of the picture, all things being equal.
If you look here, you'll find a quick rundown of orbital types -- of interest is Geostationary Orbit (GEO), which is what would be necessary to accomplish what you want. However, its altitude is 35786 km / 22228 mi. So, if they were to push the satellite to a higher orbit (which is also much more expensive to do, and required a much bigger launch vehicle and other things I'm probably overlooking), the resolution would be 53^2 (2809) times poorer, again all things being equal. This would make a 1m resolution picture into a 53m resolution picture. Not likely to catch you sunbathing in the back yard.
They would have to increase their optical system by over 3 orders of magnitude to do as you suggest.
I'm no expert, and I have probably overlooked many things. However, this is a quick summary of why it's not as easy to do as it sounds.
-Lunatic