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U.S. Allows Sale of Half-Meter Satellite Photos
kreinsch writes "According to an article in today's Washington Post, the U.S. Government quietly granted a license to Space Imaging, Inc. two weeks ago to allow the sale of satellite photos with half-meter resolution, as compared to the current one-meter resolution available." As the article points out, this effectively ends the monopoly the spy agencies had on this high-end imagery.
Actually you can look at Stockholm (Sweden) at .25 meter resolution right now. And even at that resolution it's hard to se an object of that size....
http://www.lantmateriet.com/sbindex.htm
(in swedish, but should be useful anyway)
I hate argue with someone of such grand intelect as yourself but SAR is Synthetic Aperature Radar. SAR does involve image resolution enhancement but in the case of SAR it seems to be more along the lines of optimizing sweep ranges and frequencies for single shot images.
> I find it strange that these companies are based > on the US in the first place.
> Why wouldn't they move to another country where > no limits to satellite image resolution exist?
Because:
1. Moving to another country is a very chancy and expensive proposition, and
2. Unlike naif idiots, these companies realize that any country that doesn't have agreements with the US is also un-bloody-likely to be any good for their business. Some libertarian paradises without such agreements include North Korea, Iraq and Russia.
Will people here get their head out of their ass or, equivalently, out of _Atlas_Shrugged_ and look around, please?
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
> I find it strange that these companies are based
> on the US in the first place.
> Why wouldn't they move to another country where
> no limits to satellite image resolution exist?
Are you implying that the USA is the ONLY country that restricts public access to satellite data? Because if you are, you're completely off-base. If, on the other hand, you're implying that a business operated out of another country can get unlimited access to any US satellite data they desire, you're STILL completely off-base.
The US Fed Gov't has National Security concerns about other countries benefiting from OUR satellite technology and intelligence, so they restrict (or, restrictED) public consumption to relatively low-res (and thus tactically insignificant) data. It doesn't matter WHERE a business is located - if the Fed doesn't grant them access to data, they aren't getting it.
The US has excellent reconaisance and mapping satellites in orbit, but other countries are lagging far behind our level of tech and coverage. Just moving the company to another country doesn't mean that company would get access to the SAME tech in orbit, just under a different flag. If you want hi-res, you get it from the USA; if you want grainy low-res pics, multitudes of nations have acceptable satellites in orbit.
Bull, it just means they've upgraded enough in the interim, that they don't care.
Heck, they likely have tech that could count the dandruff flakes on your shirt, these days.
- high flying drone aircraft
- one of those ugly two-rotor drone mini-helicopter things
- telescopic lens on a nearby building
- parabolic mike on a nearby building
- phone taps
get a better browser, freak!
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No. I'm being a funny bastard but I was referring to high-precision missiles. If you know how this stuff works then you'll need a sattelite showing the coordinate system and pictures of the place. A half-meter resolution would be exactly the minimum to achieve such task. This way you can detect windows, doors, chimneys and other details that may be important for damage calculation.
Ok Troll me. But dear feminist Moderator. I am not bashing my ex-wife as a woman. No. In fact she deserves a missile for something much worser.
Now I only need a missile...
Where is the house of my ex-wife?
I find it strange that these companies are based on the US in the first place.
Why wouldn't they move to another country where no limits to satellite image resolution exist?
My bet is that image resolution doesn't really affect their current business and they're not very open to the possibilities of higher resolution imaging.
Flavio
Every pixel in that picture becomes four. Each car in that picture seems to have around six pixels. Twenty-four pixels doesn't seem enough to say much about a car, but maybe you could say SOMETHING.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Did you not see "Enemy Of The State?"
A trifle bit of flim, but they (the spooks) had super hi res tracking satellites. Made for a fun afternoon out.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
...just imagine what kind of resolution they have for themselves :>
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
To sample a 5mm spot at a height of 300km you we'll need 1.7e-3 arcsec pixels. A 500x500 detector will give you a field of .86 arcsec. Currently using interferometry you can achieve 1e-3 arcsec
but your field is very small (~10x resolution).
The main problem with interferomtry is contrast.
But adaptive optics (AO) gets high contrast but at
lower angular resolutions.
Current "disclosed military" AO systems are able to observe from the ground satelites with angular resolutions of ~.07arcsec. This is ~10cm at a height of 300km.
Actually, turning Hubble around is a pretty accurate description of the NRO satellites. The idea is to cram a mirror as large as can be carried by current launch vehicles. Hubble is 2.4 meters, so it's a pretty good guess that recon birds are around this size. To get higher resolution, you need a bigger mirror. Keyhole sats have a resolution of around 10 centimeters. to get 5 centimeter resolution, you would need an objective twice as large, which wouldn't fit in a launch vehicle, not if it was a one piece mirror. objectives much larger than current ones aren't very practical, something 2x larger could be 10x heavier, and resolution of 10cm is fine for most military needs. sure, it would be cool if you could read a license plate from orbit, but why would you want to? granted, the military does seem to buy lots of stuff just because of the coolness factor, but at some point, the law of diminishing returns kicks in, even for the pentagon (or kremlin, or mossad, MI5 or whatever). And your point about atmospheric disturbances is correct as well, in some cases, these satellites are limited to performance 10x worse that their maximum theoretical resolution because of atmospheric turbulence. and performance drops to 0% if the target is obscured by cloud cover.
.^
^.
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There is technology in development (already exists for terrestrial telescopes) called very long baseline interferometry. it's a widely used technique in radio astronomy, and is one of the latest things in visible/infrared observing. basically, you can combine the images from 2 widely separated apertures and the resulting resolution is the same as for a single aperture equal in diameter to the distance separating your two small apertures. there are plans to launch some of the interferomters for astronomical observation using baselines from 1-10km. it is likely that instruments like this can be used in the opposite direction, for terrestrial recon from space (and, perhaps already are). even a 50 meter baseline at orbits aroind 700 km would give you sub-centimeter resolution. of course, taking into account the other limitations of satellites at this altitude, that in itself probably wouldn't be very useful. the real kicker would be that this would allow imaging from geostationary orbits, so you could continuously cover the entire globe with a fleet of maybe 20 or so satellites, instant data on any location on earth, from several different angles, anytime you want it. It might even make aerial recon obsolete. pure speculation, of course, but i think this might be the most interesting explanation for the retirement of the SR-71 fleet. it would certainly be a more elegant solution than the so called aurora spyplane.
.^
^.
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Soylent Foods, Inc.
actually, that is exactly what most of these NRO satellites are, Hubble-class telescopes pointed at the ground. the best ones currently have a resolution of around 10 centimeters from normal altitudes( about 400-500 miles), so i'm sorry to tell you that the performance of Hubble isn't quite that impressive. see my earlier response to this thread for a more detailed description.
.^
^.
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Soylent Foods, Inc.
should have specified that.
.^
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Soylent Foods, Inc.
If they don't allow US corporations the right to sell those hi-res photos, someone in another country will jump on the opportunity. E.g. Spot Image, in France. IIRC, they're planning a sub-meter satellite somewhere in the next decade.
-- Colin
High end imagery? Don't you mean imaging?
Geez.
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It simply means that an object of 19 inches can register in the image- and "register" simply means that a dot on the image might be brighter or darker depending on the overall colour of the object.
Actually, it means that each pixel on the image represents 19 inches on the earth.
"If you are an idealist it doesn't matter what you do or what goes on around you, because it isn't real anyway."-R.P.W.
I think they maybe better, I have my self seen a picture that had been shot by a russian spy sat,
you saw a man from above reading the PRAWDA and you could have read some headlines, if you had been able to read those cryllic letters....
Michael
This is amazing.
;-)
Finally, with half-meter resolution I can finally tell if my mom's left yet to pick me up from the high school!
Now all I need to do is find a site wtih a 15-minute refresh of, say, the entire world. But just my house would be ok too. Starting tomorrow, I'm opening a fund to put a satellite right above my house.
Donate! Come on, you know you want to.
--
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
©©©One more step to getting pictures of my ass taken from an orbiting satellite
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
Hey,
That reminds me of the Monty Python skit "Blackmail". A TV show where they blackmail people with incriminating evidence. They basically ask the victims to pay them money not to reveal more evidence. Here's a sample (get more here)
"And now: a letter, a hotel registration book, and a series of photographs, which could add up to divorce, premature retirement, and possible criminal proceedings for a company director in Bromsgrove. He's a freemason, and a conservative M.P., so Mr S. that's 3,000 pounds please to stop us from revealing: Your name, The name of the three other people involved, The youth organization to which they belonged, and the shop where you bought the equipment!"
Good fun...
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
You shouldn't feel all THAT safe... it just means that the pictures They SELL are at 19 inch, the ones that they DON'T SELL are more interesting and most likely at a higher resolution... so better stay inside ;-)
IKONOS First Image - Washington Monument
More images here
Unclassified half-meter imagery has been available for some time. Environmentalists have had it to view pine trees on Ft. Bragg for some endangered woodpecker.
The gov't tends to classify imagery produced from gov't sources, whereas it has some limitations in classifiying imagery from commercial sources. But, if it is a US company producing this imagery, it should expect to have Uncle Sam oversight on what product it is putting out.
sine puella vita suget
Namely, that this development should follow so closely on the long-awaited shutdown of the Chernobyl reactor.
Why is it ironic? Because Chernobyl wasn't the first Soviet reactor to experience a serious accident; the Soviets had an even worse reactor accident more than a decade earlier, and they successfully covered it up. But by the time the Chernobyl incident occurred, spy satellites made that sort of cover-up impossible.
joke: Now if only we could have had them overseeing the ballot-counting in Florida...
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
"As the article points out, this effectively ends the monopoly the spy agencies had on this high-end imagery. "
Yeah, right... the military has had the ability to read the face of a watch from space for decades.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
I just have this bad feeling that foreign nations will bring to bear such heavy pressures on the Administration that all the fun stuff to look at closely will be blocked for "National Security Reasons." So that leaves National Parks, baseball games, and the Playboy Manion to order...
Dan.
"Claim everything, concede nothing, and when convicted - alledge fraud"
I think most of them never go into orbit, but are launched to study atmospheric conditions in high altitude over polar areas (read: northern lights (aurora borealis)).
But if they really want to, they are probably capable of launching satellites as well. Note that there would be little reason for Norway to do this for military purposes, as we are just a puppet in the arms of NATO^H^H^H^HUSA when it comes to the military. You can read more about the launching facility at www.rocketrange.no.
Hm, so maybe I'm being a bit naive saying 'could be'. :-)
I'm pretty sure that 'monopoly' in the text is referring to 'spy agencies' monopoly on accessing this type of imagery, which has little to do with the commercial meaning of 'monopoly'. On to something completely different; what's to stop an commercial entity from launching a satellite with the capability to photograph US soil? Maybe the actual photographing would be legal, but the distribution would not?
Well, as for covering the same area continuously, this can be accomplished using an geosynchronous/geostationary orbit - which is already used for comms/TV/etc.
:-)
However, to maintain the same position over earth, the satellite is positioned ca 22,300 miles out in space, which is a bit far out for effective photography
Apparently something called LEO (Low Earth Orbit) is used for imagery, a LEO being 200-500 miles out in space. In a LEO, the satellite must maintain a certain speed to counter earth's gravity. At this speed (17,000 mph), they can circle the earth in about 90 minutes.
Good and very polite argument.
for starters, the "wife tanning" example is terrible
Read http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/12/16/22182 09&cid=54
second, seeing what's in your yard? please, anything that flies
Come on... it's forbiden (and much more expensive) to a plane/chopter to fly over my house (I clarify it, it's forbiden to fly over the city) whithout a special permission.
best that you'll see is maybe what kind of fountain Madonna has in her yard or something
Or forbidden satellital TV antennas in some asiatic countries...
--ricardo
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
This is a case where the guys who can tell you anything probably shouldn't. And anything you think you might know can't be confirmed.
Which is just as it should be.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
Oops, math mistake -- it's about 2 arc seconds, not 0.03 (forgot to convert radians to degrees). It doesn't affect the conclusion, though.
Find free books.
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So what your saying is that if a company can afford to spy on me wherever I go they should be alowed to? I don't think I'm being overly paranoid here, idustrial espionage, private investigation, and even stalking can be done with kind of equipment, and the government should have the right to at least keep some of it in check.
I will address some flaws that are not addressed with the previous reply's content.
The problem with such assumptions is the weather. Imagine looking through a fog bank--you can't too well, and if it is thick fog, you can't at all. Now imagine being a satalite many miles away trying to look through all the clouds. Then we throw in the dust in the air, then other water vapor, and now we can throw in heat wave distortions (the mirage effect over hot pavement, or over a grill that "bends" the image in the other side). You can try to deal with the heat by shooting the picture at night, but then you loose much illumination. The ideal photography times are a cool morning, or just before sun set on a cool day when there is no cloud cover to 1.)block the shot, or 2.) absorb heat and keep the region warm (blanket effect). There is still dust and other space debris getting in your way, so it would be very difficult to actually read the date of a coin on the ground even if the Hubble and other sats could do such a thing in the first place.
Macx
I'd have to stop spanking my monkey in the garden.
They are probably more interested in things that threaten George's administration, and less interested in things like how you mistreat poor animals.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Next /. Poll: Whose abode do you want sat photos of?
o CmdrTaco
o Hemos
o CowboyNeal
o JonKatz
o timothy
o Cliff
I'm betting JonKatz will win; a group of crazed /.'ers will invade his back yard, seeking to do him wrong. Jesse Jackson will be there, mumbling something incoherent about Hellmouth...
--
-- Geof F. Morris
I'd have to stop spanking my monkey in the garden. Like they said, 19 inch objects are clearly discernable. ;)
Half meter photos of Natalie Portman sunbathing topless on the beach! Kick ass!
Steady on - Those may be valid statements based on what we know today, but how do we know that in few thousand years one or two may of those may be filed in the same drawer as "flat earth"..... Although the 2nd and 4th ones are so tightly defined that they are probably fairly safe bets, the 1st and 3rd points you mention have wacking great "as far as we know" qualifiers on them.
loser you can't even spell gaotse.cx right. hahhahahaha
Sorry it's not my homepage.......OR MY DAD!!!
The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. --Robert Benchley
You can get "1-meter" images through a fairly intuitive navigation interface at The Terraserver (a Micro$oft-owned property).
MS got copies of US Geological Survey maps and "1-meter" satellite photos and has scanned them and wrapped them in a slightly over-complicated website. Coverage is pretty good for most of the US, and even for other parts of the world (don't know if USGS is the data-source outside of the US). The survey maps are mostly circa 1981-1992, and the "1-meter" photos are ~ 1988-1996.
I put "1-meter" in quotes because the resolution of many of the shots seems to be worse than that. If you compare the above referenced image against the terraserver photo of the Washington Monument, it is obvious that terraserver's isn't as good. Though, judging by the scaffolding apparent on the monument, the image at NCSU is about 3 or so years more recent, and may benefit from superior "1-meter" technology.
Terraserver recently got "SPIN-2" satellite images, though I've never used them, because the interface seems to demand JavaScript and an image-viewing plugin (CleverContent) that I haven't bothered with getting/checking for security issues.
There are some holes in the satellite coverage for the US, and the places where USGS maps overlap don't always get the best treatment. Twice I've wanted to look at places that were covered up by the key from one map, when they could obviously have been displayed from an adjacent map. Still, for a free (beer) service it isn't so bad.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
Do you know anything about that guy from goatse.cx? It looks like you did a number on him!
From a brochure for a car rental firm in Tokyo : When passenger of foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage then tootle him with vigor.
Everywhere... Did you ever see Sliver?
People that believe in their opinions don't post AC.
Tanning salon? Privacy? You haven't seem some of the hidden camera footage that I have mate! :)
People that believe in their opinions don't post AC.
You are forgetting who developed all of the technology to send the satalite into orbit and actually take the pictures. The government did for the tax payers.
Why would you see a person? In one "meter" images, one meter by one meter is represented by *one pixel*.
Wouldn't .5 meter resolution have 4x higher quality than 1 meter?
I'm just playing with the "Zoom In" power toy for IE, and at 4x resolution I think you could have a chance of at least identifying the make of a few of those cars...
"Watch these suckers jump when I get root." - l33t j03
Now I can see when my dog needs to come inside without leaving my computer. A great day indeed.
Do i really need a sig?
With a half-meter resolution, you can see my shadow. You see it as only a couple of pixels, depending on what time of day. You can't get much information from a shadow. You can't identify me as me, because I'm only two or three pixels. But... What if they develop some way of compensating for turbulence and radiation? I know this delves into chaos theory and all, but... What if? Then, there are ways of seeing me now. You just have to get closer. A telephoto lens can read the time on my watch from a mile. Never mind satellites. They can't get much out of a blob and a shadow. But the government (and corporations. And individuals.) can observe me through other, much more detailed methods.
No, that whole satellite imagery thing was just plain silly.
First off, the satellite is travelling at thousands of miles per hour (relative to the ground), so the shot where they couldn't see Brill's face, because they were directly overhead was stupid, stupid, stupid. None of it was even remotely possible.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yes, I've heard of infared, I've also heard that IR is reflected by clouds.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
By taking mutiple, slightly offset immages of the same area you can increase the resolution by averaging overlapped values at particular positions.
The actual algo is a bit more complicated but I don't remember it off hand.
The problem is I think the process scales at n^2 so you need alot of processing and alot of pictures to really boost the resolution.
But it is pretty easy to increase the resolution by a couple of factors.
That's rich. You can bet that anytime the NSA, CIA, or DoD lets anybody see or use a technology, it's because it's out of date and has been replaced with something much more powerful.
You can only image to about half a wavelength.
SAR radar peaks at tens of centimeter wavelength.
This month's issue on Popular Science has such a picture for you.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
So far one single corporation was granted access to sell the photos. This does not end a monopoly, but rather looks like it would be starting one (regardless of the fact that they may claim they'll license others in the future, right now there's still only one).
OK, They have been selling one meter images for a couple of years, and now have the OK to sell half meter. New sat? Or has the old one been capabile of 1/2 meter all along, and we've been getting downgraded pics?
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
no, I think you are thinking of Enemy of the State :o)
.... and that was VIDEO from a satellite, not pictures .... just imagine the BANDWIDTH required ....
...... when I saw that, it pretty much ruined the movie for me .... but I like to pull movies apart like that ...
I don't think they did license plates, but the satellite footage in real time with the optical resolution they had in the movie was possible, I guess, but still a stretch
This was the same movie that turned a normal security camera into a rotating 360 degree model
rLowe
----- rL
The government obviously sees this as a matter of national security, and sees the satellite photographs as a military asset. The government in and of itself doesn't design and manufacture F-18's, but they do have a say over what countries they can be sold to. And I think that makes sense. Not to mention that the development of a lot of this stuff is funded by tax dollars from the government.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
The scale runs from 1 to 9. A few entries:
Distinguish taxiways from runways at large airports. Recognize seaports.
Distinguish between models of small/medium helicopters (e.g., HELIX A from HELIX B from HELIX C, HIND D from HIND E, HAZE A from HAZE B from HAZE C).
Identify the shape of antennas on EW/GCI/ACQ radars as parabolic, parabolic with clipped corners or rectangular.
Identify the spare tire on a medium-sized truck.
Distinguish between SA-6, SA-ll, and SA-17 missile airframes.
Identify individual launcher covers (8) of vertically launched SA-N-6 on SLAVA-class vessels. Identify automobiles as sedans or station wagons.
Identify fitments and fairings on a fighter-sized aircraft (e.g., FULCRUM, FOXHOUND).
Identify ports, ladders, and vents on electronics vans.
Detect the mount for antitank guided missiles (e.g., SAGGER on BMP-1).
Detect details of the silo door hinging mechanism on Type III-F, III-G, and II-H launch silos and Type III-X launch control silos.
Identify the individual tubes of the RBU on KIROV-, KARA-, and KRIVAK-class vessels.
Identify individual rail ties.
As you can see, at 0.5M resolution, most of the intel a military force really needs can be extracted. The examples at level 7 are interesting, however.
Israel lobbied the US to put a provision into US law prohibiting commercial satellite photography of Israel. Yes, the whole country. Unclear why; maybe they're worried about newer photographs of their nuclear bomb plants or refugee camps.
Well, I don't know about you - But I walk upright. This means that to a sattellite, I'm about 7 inches across at the head, and maybe 16-19 inches at my shoulders. So yes, It would be extremely hard to identify me w/ the 1/2 meter resolution images. For all you non-bi-pedal f00s though, your mothers can keep tabs on you.
signature smigmature
- James
Did you see the Macy's Day parade? My company did that (3D-Fly over parade route). There are so many uses for hi-res imagery other than spying on someone. The thing we are finding with hi-res imagery is nobody knows what to do with it. 1m imagery was not good enough for tv, so we used 1/2 meter air-photo imagery.
From some of the other comments, do you know how long it would take to find somebody's girlfriend laying naked in their backyard? Just about forever and a day unless you knew when that person was going to lay naked in the back yard and you had total control over when the satellite was going to make the pass over that particular area( not very likely unless you can change the orbit of the earth). Otherwise it would be sheer luck!
If you want to see what the US doesn't want you to see, you can always go to terraserver. My home isn't visible, but all the army bases are...
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
Nevertheless, whith that resolution you can get enough information about goods productions, plantations, petrol explorations, building surfaces, electric/energy installations, radio installations, satellital antennas (which are forbidden in some countries), and so on.
Ask Putin (replace this for any president you'd prefer) which method is cheaper to control his opposites: to maintain a satellite infrastructure and research? Or to buy the photograph?
I am not afraid of my privacity, I don't have anything important to hide, but privacity, in the sense that is technological expensive to peep you, is a fundamental value in most of "western minds"*.
* Tried to avoid "democracy" or "economy" overused words.
--ricardo
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
Aside from those naive examples, it means that healthy companies and individuals are now able to buy valued information about smaller or poorer counterparts.
So, the world has become a enourmous peep show for those who can afford it.
Definitevely not an argument to cheers, although not worse that when only few countries' governments were able to peek to the whole world.
--ricardo
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
Certain parts of sat images of way out in the Neveda desert are often blurred. "Must have been an anomaly", quoth the vendor, "we'll get it next time". Curiously enough, they never did.
Image tapes of the middle of nowhere in Alaska sometimes have large groups of pixels with exactly the same values in exactly the same relative positions. Yes, it probably was a processing artifact. The question is whether it was intentional.
So even with half-meter data, I still wouldn't worry that anybody will see anything secret, or that privacy is being invaded from above. Even if a sat catches you having sex on the back lawn, you will only show up as four or five pixels anyways.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
Why is it the end of a monopoly on high-end space imaging if you still have to get a license from the US government to sell it?
(After all, people get licenses for Windows all the time, and presumably would continue to even if MacOS, Linux, Solaris, and all the rest dissapearaed.)
-Rob
The article mentions a few sample resolutions, including a 10 centimeter resolution that would allow you to "resolve 'the rivet lines on bomber aircraft.'" How detailed can these pictures be? I mean, could they spin Hubble around, refocus, and snap the shutters a few times, or do you really need more specialized equipment? At some point, most likely, the limits will be due to heat rising from objects blurring things, or air molecules getting in the way... etc.
However, the ultimate resolution of the spy satellites is not the only measure of their capabilities. For instance, can they image the exact same area continuously? Every 5 minutes? Every hour? Once a day? How large an area can they image at the highest possible resolution? How large an area can they image at a lower, but still useful resolution (for instance, for counting tanks or airplanes)?
My guess is that "scope time" or whatever the in-house jargon at the spy satellite agency is, would be very hard to get, and consequently ruthlessly rationed. I'd imagine perving on people sunbathing nude is generally ranked fairly low in the priority list.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
A couple of months back I wrote a work of fiction speculating on the possibility that a *company* (rather than a government) was capable of constant surveillance of any individual. What would they do with it? Well, you know how amusement parks and such are always trying to sell you footage of you doing stuff? Maybe something like that. And of course, maybe some people would pay more NOT to have their activities visible...
Tweet, tweet.
This could be an indication that the 'spy agencies' or whoever now have access to even more sophisticated satellite-imagery, as 'obsolete' military technology tends to become avaliable to the public in one way or another.
You always get your pictures from space 24 hrs
late to make them unusable for tactical purposes
during times of war. AND I bet you 10 bucks the
US government gets every single coordinate from
which you requested shots to be taken. Maybe even
as soon as you submit them, so you can imagine
busy towing of new stuff into hangars once their
bird gets close for a shot.
Not that the Russians would care, their RESURS F14
is still flying over Groom Lake at an altitude of
230 km (82.1 deg steep inclination) with several
course corrections having been made.
Sometimes a who, what and when is more precious
than not letting them have the info in the first
place, which is getting harder because you can
already buy old 2m resolution birds anyway.
The resolving power of any telescope can be calculated by the formula Theta = 115.8/D, .05 seconds of arc.
.5 seconds of arc in most cases, although i'm not sure this is as critical for taking pictures of terrestrial objects as it is for astronomical ones. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong on any of this.
.^
where Theta is angualr resolution expressed in seconds of arc, and D is the diameter of the objective of the telescope/camera, which is what a spy satellite is. Now, the Hubble telescope has an objective of 2.4 meters, which is probably pretty close to the maximum diameter that will fit inside current launch vehicles, so the NRO satellites can't be much bigger than this. so that works out to around
to figure out actual size from angular size and distance use the formula
angular size(in degrees) = 57.3*actual size / distance
which works out to right around 10 centimeters, if i've done the math right. so unless they have multi-segment meirros for their satellites or some other unknown capability that is about hte theoeretical limit of their resolution. Interestingly though, atmospheric turbulence (what astronomers refer to as 'seeing') limits actual performance to
^.
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The limit of resolution on a camera is the diffraction limit. That's the point where the wavelength of the light is larger than the angular distance of the object you're viewing. The formula is (angular resolution) = 1.22 * (wavelength)/(telescope diameter) in radians. To convert radians to length, multiply by the distance from your target (which is a good approximation at large distances.)
:)
Most low orbit satellites are about 700 km up. Visible light is around 300-600 nanometers...call it 400 nm.
So the theoretical minimum telescope needed to have a one-centimeter resolution on the ground would be diameter = 1.22*400e-9*700e3/1e-2, or about 34 meters across. For reference, the Hubble's mirror is 2.4 meters diameter.
So it's possible. Just not bloody likely given current limits on what we can build in space.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
A company should not need a license to sell photographs that it took with a satellite that it designed, built, and owns. The US government does not own the entire planet.
I don't think it's *that* detailed, guys.
Here's one of the early "meter" images.
Sure, you can see the road, and big buildings, but you can't really identify a person...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Does this bug other people as much as it does me?
Half-meter resolution doesn't mean that it "clearly shows objects as small as 19 inches!" This is quite misleading.
It simply means that an object of 19 inches can register in the image- and "register" simply means that a dot on the image might be brighter or darker depending on the overall colour of the object.
"To clearly show an object" implies that you'll be able to identify it. Some might even think that you'd be able to see features and details of the object. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This is better:
At half-meter resolution... forestry officials can count trees, and urban planners can view streetscapes, even discerning manhole covers.
But I wish they had put that at the top of the article, not at the end of the last paragraph!
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Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Of course, the optical resolution doesn't really matter, they can always zoom in the picture to get more detail. You know, like they do on The X-Files.
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