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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.
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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Not true. To get a 5-mm-resolution 500x500 image from a height of 300 km, you'd have to have a field of view of 0.03 arc seconds. For comparison, atmospheric turbulence normally makes it pointless to try to make telescopic images with fields of view of less than about 1000 arc seconds. That's why the Hubble Space Telescope got built -- to do astronomy without that nasty atmosphere in the way.
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.
If someone's afraid of the secret police knocking on his door about his satellite antenna, I think he has more to worry about from neighborhood informants than from space-based imaging. He could always put his satellite antenna under a blanket or something.
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"*.
You need to be realistic about the privacy you expect. When you do something outdoors, you don't normally have an expectation of privacy.
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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.
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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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