Slashdot Mirror
DigitalGlobe To Sell 61cm Resolution Satellite Photos
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Sample images from DigitalGlobe's QuickBird satellite are now available. This is the highest resolution commercial satellite with the ability to take panchromatic images at a resolution of 61cm." Space Imaging's best offering is a 1m panchromatic resolution image, so they have some competition it seems.
Seriously, though, that's pretty darn cool. Pretty soon, we won't even need that stupid blimp over our favorite sporting events.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Does anybody know how long it takes these birds to make an orbit - it's getting aufully hard these days to bury the bodies without someone taking a picture.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Will they release photos of the headlines they grab off the newspapers, or the details in it...
Seems the technology is there, high quality optics, incredible zooming and fine digitation of the photos...how close IS close...??
the link to the images is broken...
none of the links to DigitalGlobe's website work for me. attempt to load failed and some ssl error?
no way it's been slashdotted already?!
ha!
</humour> (in case the absurdity of this post and all the exclamation marks didn't make it entirely clear)
"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepeneur'." -George W. Bush
slashdotted already...damn
Now they will be able to see the big board!
Is it?? Damn that was fast!
I sure hope that the navigational computer isn't running on the same one as their server, because this would be the first time /. actually "brought down" hardware literally.
Cherish. Live. Dream.
Anyone able to mirror these before the box went up in
Thankfully, I never go outside anymore, so until they get xray versions of these puppies I am safe.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
How hard can the "challenge" be? There are cars there! Just take one of them into town when you get hungry!
Incidentally, that happened to one of my cousins; he farmed several acres of land that were passed down from our great grandfather, and devoted a small patch to growing marijuana. One of the local troublemakers got into an argument with him once, and started watching him with a satellite imaging service (cf Enemy of the State). Sure enough, he mysteriously got turned in for growing pot by an anonymous caller and lost the entire farm. When he got out of prison, he went on welfare and has been living off the government dole for quite a while now because he has few skills and a nasty criminal record that he doesn't deserve.
I really feel bad for him, and I think we should all oppose this horrible tool of surveillance before it is used against one of us.
Bill
instead of wasting spare cycles on SETI@home, we could be using them to find Osama.
no, i'm serious.
resolution of 61cm is more than enough to detect the movement of a cluster of people/troops. images could be sent to a central server, for distributed analysis and any unexplained masses moving to Pakistan could be pinpointed. why couldn't the US dedicate the spare CPU cycles to finding this terrorist?
All links seem down, mirror?
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
These guys see him, know what side his hair is parted on, and how many rounds are in the clip of his Kalashnikov.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
n/t
Slashdoted already? Let's hope their quickbird can't take a touch more abuse.
Always a bad sign when the website flakes out. Usually means no one loadtested it, and some programmer took a bunch of shortcuts and has some incredibly inefficiant design (it looks like everything goes through one script with all the question marks).
Can you say yuch? Can you say no scalability? Can you say silly?
Probably trying to be cool...
COuld you at least do something interesting, like promes or something? I mean, any loser can do random numbers. Try pi next.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
For those of you who are really having a lot of trouble getting anywhere with the link, I can tell you from the 2 or three I downloaded before all hell broke loose they aren't that much more impressive than the 1m resolution ones.
Terraserver has aerial photos of the entire country for free. You can look up your address and everything.
Maybe composite aerial photos aren't quite as cool as satellite photos, but who cares? It's free.
Because the site is being uber-flakey, I'm caching some of the images from their site and putting them on my website at http://guh.nu/temp/
These images are probably copyrighted by digitalglobe.com so um, yeah.
Here is a link to some info on that sat.
http://www.eurimage.com/Products/qb.shtml
And, granted, 2.000 feet equal 60.96cm, but in my book "2 feet" gets rounded to 60cm.
These guys see him, know what side his hair is parted on, and how many rounds are in the clip of his Kalashnikov.
a) You mean 'magazine', not 'clip'
b) Satellites don't have superman-style x-ray vision; and bin Ladin wears a turban; and steel doesn't transmit light.
HTH.
Moral of this story is to grow your weed in small patches of less than one sq meter each, or better yet, less than half a square meter each so that the surouning vegitation fills in each pixal. That or just grow legal crops.
I think it's time to stop sunbathing nude on the roof. Alas.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
try later
Studies have shown that decriminalizing drug use removes the societal stigma that keeps addiction rates low. And since our government has plenty of money (look at the deductions on your next paycheck if you don't believe me), maintaining a war on drugs really doesn't take a big chunk out of the budget. And it is worth every penny to anyone who cares about their children and friends.
Dropping the war on drugs is only slightly less absurd than dropping laws against murder. Drugs destroy families, friendships, and lives; why should our government encourage their use?
freebsd guy
You can always protect yourself against this type
of invasion by blocking the line of site between
the satelite and whatever it's trying to look at.
But think of this. As more and more companies allow private citizans to access this information, it will be harder and harder to police what they are looking at and who they are selling the images too.
In the US the major media networks have agreed not to show any images of dead Afghanis, and the government bought all the Afghanistan images from Space Imaging. Do you think it would make a difference if American citizens could see what was happening at groud level there?
If it's available in the private sector, one has to wonder what the military has available. Ever since I can remember, what the general public knowledge is, usually runs about 10 years behind the times. When I got out of the military, we had been using touch tone phones (Autovon) for 5 years, but the private sector was just becoming aware of touchtone, as limited areas were beginning to test them in the USA. During the Falkland islands conflict, most people were amazed that a ship could be sunk from 150 miles away by an air launched missle. We were amazed at Stormin' Norman's description of the "Luckiest man in Iraq" (the video of a car just making it across the bridge as a laser guided tv camera bomd hit just feet behind him). That we were able to give 15 minutes warning to Saudi Arabia that a Scud was on the way and where it was targeted. (even though the tech had been in place for quite a while.)
In Afghanistan we are using poratble satellite phones and video (even CNN is using it),and (even if it is webcam quality), voice printing to identify commanders and Osama bin Laden. If you think this 61 cm is something, I wouldn't be surprised if the military resolution is at least half of 61 cm or even less. Probably be able to get the Expiration date from his drivers license, or what brand of cigarettes he smokes.
Here are the direct links to the images:
p an_61cm_ff.jpg
b _ms_2pt8m_ff.jpg
. digitalglobe.com+www.digitalglobe.com
http://www.digitalglobe.com/imgs/basic/pan/thumb_
http://www.digitalglobe.com/imgs/Standard/ms/thum
Or if they go down too; Google:
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=+site:www
...in which the hirsute denizens of Walden Pond were contemplating possible Republican strategies for reducing teen pregnancies. My favorite: Mike's suggestion of a fleet of megaphone-equipped vans roaming suburban streets during the evening hours, blaring "CUT THAT OUT!" every few seconds.
On a decidedly on-topic note, though, imaging all 9,629,091 sq km (according to the CIA World Factbook 2001) of the USA at 61-cm resolution in 24-bit color would result in 77.6 terabytes of data. That's for one frame; at a rate 1 frame per second, that would be 6.7 exabytes per day. Ask the Almighty to provide you with a 10,000-to-one compression algorithm, and you could get a day's worth of data down under a petabyte.
Let's see Jon Voight find Will Smith in that.
Shouldn't the images be less angled than this? If the satellite is 423 miles above the surface, then shouldn't I see the tops of buildings and less of the sides? It looks like Ultima 5.
even though i can now see the site, no images load. with the quality of this site, i'd say its hosted off of a rice cracker running dos.
I can finally find that %$#@ frisbee I threw up on my roof ten years ago!
Hm, look at that, I'm getting a little bit thin up top...
SIGFEH
Anybody want to flame these people?
-Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
... less than 3 minutes after posting.
This has to be some sort of record.
The MIT Orthophoto server has 50cm resolution images. Here is Harvard Square at 50cm resolution. These images have been available for a while, though for Massachusetts only.
Conservative estimates are that the US Government has military satellites at LEAST an order of magnitude better than the best commercial photos available. That would make 6.1cm resolution. Personally, I believe they're better than that... I've seen a few images through my work that has convinced me.
:)
I visited a military site in Israel where they print satellite photos... and mistakenly saw a low res screen preview (i.e. 72dpi) of a 500MB satellite photo... and I could already make out cars and trucks quite easily. The full-res data was easily 30-50x the resolution I saw on the monitor.
Think about it...
A/C... cause I'm 'fraid!
Correct me if I'm wrong... but resolution doesn't mean a thing if the image quality isn't good. If the image itself isn't very clear, the resolution won't matter. Is this a true 61 cm per pixel image -- or rather, a faux resolution... I can make a 1 m image have 61 cm resolution, but it won't change a thing. Still an ambitious attempt, though.
It works much better if you use just a standard http access.
Try this: http://www.digitalglobe.com/?goto=gallery instead and stop torturing tose poor servers.
Maybe this article will get updated URLs soon?
I may be much for technology, but this kind of thing comprimises US national security. I live here in the country (aka, not city) so things like airplanes crashing in our house is'nt a problem. This sub-point is that I'm safe from extra-government actions.
What it comes down to is; if we can buy pictures of 64 cm= 1 pixel, so can terrorists and enemy countries. The US military made this type of device in the Cold War so they could SPY on other countries for intelligence (however mainly USSR at the time). Now, they're used in large intelligence missions over enemy territory so that OUR soldiers don't get killed due to lack of mapping.
There is a good basis for the US military to have this technology, but what are the pluses for non-military to have this? Other than the sake of knowing, not any. They aren't valid survey techniques, you pay surveyors that. Home camera's make good security systems, sat cams don't.
The negative's come at a distinct disadvantage. Say a US civillian is interested in a Chinese nuclear power reactor and pays for sat scans. Then they post it online, which I believe this has been done (can't remember site). If the Chinese gov't find about this, don't you think that they would be slightly miffed off at the US? Or how about taking pictures of US military installations? Those are dangerous to the saftey of US citizens, Military and non-military.
Josh Crawley
ps: I'll probably be modded down, since mod's here dislike anything but the typical knee-jerk , no matter how well a disagreeing is written.
Assumptions:
Satellite Lifetime: 5 years.
Highly optimistic # of usable images per day : 50
Cost of satillite: 1 billion dollars.
cost / # of images =
1,000,000,000 / (50 * 365 * 5) = $10958 per image.
They'll be lucky to make their payroll much less their debt payments.
This industry is higly subsidized by taxpayer dollars via Defense Department spending. Why this is contracted out to companies pretending to be private industry is a bit of joke. With India, Israel, China and France subsidizing their
satillites, this "private" satillite remote sensing industry is a complete fraud. By the way, the reason they do it is because if you can launch a polar orbit satillite, you can launch and ICBM. Why not put a camera on your test payload and minimize the losses?
Orbital was working on the quickbird and earlybird satellites (the names got changed around as schedules, ahem, moved). At the same time I was also working on our tractor-trailer tracking system. I figured that if we could save a lot of money if just ditch our GPS/cellular tracking hardware and put giant bar codes on the trailers, and track them visually with the satellites. But, alas, we only had 1 meter resolution and even with a 53' trailer, there wasn't enough room for a suitable bar code. But, with this better resolution, my plan's now feasable!!
Fun fact: giant shipping companies lose one or two trailers a year each because they don't know where they left them.
p.s. patent pending. Ok, not really, but if anyone tries this, please let this post serve as evidence of prior art.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
61 centimeters, my ass. That's two feet to you and me.
They might as well have called it 0.6096m resolution.
Despite being so offtopic, i feel i must inject.
:)
If such studies show what you say, then care to explain why one particular country named The Netherlands (ala Amsterdam) has significantly LESS use of such drugs than even the United States. [link]
Also you may notice there some other facts such as the lower murder rate, and what i saw as the noticable level of ignorance of some American Politicians..
I'm involved in trail planning, and could use this. GlobExplorer's imagery is several years old.
If the obvious were a snake it would have enveloped you with it's limbless tube-like torso long ago.
The key word here is 'Electric'.
Imagine if you will, a tired lazy old hag that has nothing to do but waste away her useless life watching t.v. and eating pastries.
Now imagine a youthful, vivacious, whip of a teenager, just becoming aware of the world arround him and his role in it.
Exactly what the New Gestapo fears the most, unbridled, raw emotion. And power.
Their question, `how do we stop this?` their answer, remove the LEGS, the LIFEBLOOD of the youth of America. Promote laziness and new role models based on aged Bavarians and you have yourself the recipe for world domination.
Long day at school? Ride your lazy machine.
Long night on drugs? Ride your lazy machine.
Any reason at all? Ride your lazy machine.
And when Joe Hat launches the nukes and the EMP's ruin your ELECTRIC leg-crippling-mobiles you won't have the ability to run from Dr. Zurich and his blood guns( they have them, my friend saw one in Canada when he was a green beret) and you and your family will fall victim to one of the most obvious scams in history next to JFK.
Having used everything from 1km AVHRR data to 1m Ikonos data in my remote sensing Ph.D. research, I hope I can provide some illuminating info here. The privacy concerns voiced here are somewhat alarmist. There are several factors that make it difficult for users of Quickbird 2's 0.61-meter imagery to effectively spy on people:
1. 0.61-meter data is simply not of sufficent spatial resolution to identify people. The best you can do is to say that there's a human-sized object in the image.
2. The average revisit time of Quickbird 2 is 3.5 days (due to its 93 minute sun-synchronous orbit). So there's a window every 3.5 days where there's even the *possibility* of getting data from a particular location.
3. Many parts of the world are cloud or haze (or smog) covered much of the time. Optical sensors are confounded by this. Now, if you use radar sensors you can see through the clouds, but the resolution of commercially available radar isn't as high as that offered by Quickbird 2 (~8m for Canada's RADARSAT).
4. These data sets are IMMENSE. The area of interest has to be really important for someone to invest the money and time to develop the infrastructure (hardware and software) to process the huge quantities of data that can come from repeated collects.
5. It's very expensive. Decent quality Ikonos 1m data costs $55 per sq. km. with a minimum purchase of 100 sq. km. Clearly, your average guy isn't going to be buying the stuff. Prices will fall as more sensors come online, but the data will be prohibitively expensive for quite a while.
Now, all of that is obviated by the capabilities of the U.S. government; they likely have much higher resolution sensors (maybe even 5cm or so). But, there are much simpler ways of keeping track of people than using satellite imagery (phone taps, carnivore, video cameras, etc. come to mind).
So, let's relax and celebrate the fact that scientists finally have high resolution tools with which to do some really cool research!
"I'm not, like, that smart. I, like, forget stuff all the time." -- Paris Hilton
As an astronomer, I've always been pretty impressed with these military/commercial imaging satellites because they basically use the technology we use to look up at the skies, but instead to look down at the earth.
Here's a quick intro to the technology for those who aren't familiar.
Basically, these companies (or the air force) send a 1-ton spacecraft up on a large rocket (made by Lockheed Martin generally) and put in in geosynchronous orbit around the earth. These orbits are something like 500 miles above the earth, which means that they orbit the earth once every 1.5 hours or so. (you can try the math if you like, F=ma, a=v^2/r, a=GM/r^2)
They specifically put it into what's called a "sun-synchronous" orbit -- which means that its orbit takes it alternately over the light and dark side of the earth each half of the trip. And wherever the satellite passes over the earth (on the light side), it will be approximately 10:30 am. (if you have trouble visualizing this, draw a line in your mind from sun to earth, then align the plane created by the satellite's orbit vertically with this line.)
So every orbit, the satellite traces out a wide swath of territory it can take pictures of (like peeling strips off a potato). These swaths are perhaps 10km wide, and can extend for 100s or 1000s of kilometers in length. Note that it can take pictures straight down if it wants, or it can aim to the side slightly. This is why satellite pictures may not look like they were taken from directly above, but rather from the side a little bit. Black and white images are standard, color will take longer of course.
So it turns out that with these satellites, every place on the earth will eventually pass beneath the path during daylight, and will be able to be imaged. They will give you statistics such as "Revisit frequency is 50% of the earth within 24 hours, or 100% within 3 days, more if you don't require the satellite to be directly overhead". (This is used to plan observations, or to tell imaging clients how soon a target can be seen, which might be important for the military, for example).
Pricing of the images is of course based on recovering the development and launch costs, so individual images will be pretty expensive. Custom tasks are even more expensive. But remember, the satellite is continuously taking images (it's not waiting for clients), and they store the data for future use.
So far, the only kids of satellite imagery have been still-images, but many speculate that live video has been possible for several years now (like in "enemy of the state"). I'm quite sure the us military has this capability, but I myself have never heard a definitive response on this question... Hope you find this useful!
And now we have your IP address.
/. could keep their server logs secure? They can't even keep out the skript-kiddies, much less the US government...
You think those losers as
1) Orbital satilites orbit (well, duh, otherwise they'd fall on your head!), and as such, they are unsuitable for stalking someone. Exception is Geosync orbit, see below)
2) (civilian) imaging sats are in LEO for a couple of reasons, first, the closer you are to the earth, the better resolution you can get with the same imaging equiptment, just like the closer you are to your object with your camera, the bigger it appears, and you don't need a zoom lens. Since the amount you can get for a sat pict varies in relation to the amount of detail you can offer, commercial sat providers have a vested interest in LEO, secondly, a LEO sat allows the company to sell pictures of everywhere (eventually), and thus a better customer base then if it's constantly pointing at Washington DC.
3) Retasking (altering a sat's orbit in order to aquire your image sooner is _expensive_. Due to atmospheric drag, meteor showers, etc, Sats shot up are equiped with manuvering thrusters to allow them to stay in orbit longer. Obviously the fuel has to be shot up there with the sat, and therefore each sat has a finite lifespan in direct relation to the amount of fuel the sat has. I would speculate that a commercial oranization (and indeed the govt too) organization would be loath to retask a sat and thus lower its lifespan.
4) 65cm is a lot of space. Realize that each 65 cm space is a pixel. So your face would be less then a pixel. Pretty hard to ID you based on that.
5) Looking through a sat is like looking through a drinking straw. Say you were looking for Bin Laden. Even assuming you were looking through a sat with arbitary resolution, you're only going to get a small swath of image. Say 10km across. If UBL is sitting at km 11, you'll never find him.
So calm down a bit folks, it's not the End Of The World As We Know It. This product is useful for people like weather forcasters, famers, builders, desaster recovery folks, etc. People whose target is big, and not going anywhere in a hurry. Noone's gonna be reading your paper over your shoulder witht his sat. If they do, they'll see 2 white pixels for the newspaper, and one black one for your hair maybe, assuming you have black hair. I think they'll have to buy their own copy of the New York Times.
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Wow, once we can get that res down to 1cm or less, CowboyNeal might be able to finally find his wee-wee.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
so i decided to check out Groom Lake in nevada. and indeed you can see the groom lake AFB, runways, hangars and all. unfortunately, over this particular area they limit the resolution to 5-10m.
but still pretty freakin cool. i want to know when the pictures are taken so i can make signs. or at least pose provocatively.
muerte
put in in geosynchronous orbit around the earth. These orbits are something like 500 miles above the earth, which means that they orbit the earth once every 1.5 hours or so
So not geosynchronous then.
An astronomer? Right....whatever you say...
...before some enterprising company ditches the satellites and offers drone shots with much higher resolution. The drone technology is nothing new. If the area is hostile, you can use tiny disposable drones
From a technical standpoint, none of this is very exciting. The only real limitation is what your government will allow you to sell to the general public. In some cases, the government will do it for you with a camera on a regular old plane.
Of course, the other issue is privacy...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
e to 6 decimal places is 2.718282
pi is 3.141593
Mmmmmmm
Uh how exactly do you propose getting live video from an orbiting satillite? In a sun sync orbit a sat would pass over everything far too quickly to even take a handful of concurrent frames of video let alone something with apparent motion you could call "video". There isn't much need to speculate about true video like from a hack movie.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Most of these satallites in polar orbits that precess with the sun line require three (3) days to return to the same position.
Thus it would take three days to cover ALL the US, & so you'd only need 77.6 TB per 3/days NOT per second.
Furthermore, there is probably a lo-res FOV of the order of about 1 pixel per 1 SqKm which is the FOV that covers the whole earth every 3 days.
The hi-res 1 pixel per (61cm)squred FOV instrument more than likely has a keyhole FOV that can be targeted from the ground.
The downlink data rate is prob about 4GB/hr and prob will continue for about 12 years (based on other similar sat's)
Still, it's nice to the numbers. Western Australia is about 1TB uncompressed in R,G,B & Height.
61cm resolution? Daaamn!
Does that mean we'll be able to see Miguel De Icaza's ego from orbit?
Working with both satllite & airborne imagery, I can assure you that:
a) can get *much* better photo from plane
b) can pick out crop types (eg: yr mates pot) with right kind of filters. & can do this with higher res from light aircraft.
To this day, most airbourne photographic surveys are carried out with large format traditional wet photography. The negatives are then scanned at desired resolution. A high res negative taken from 1000m altitude can be magnified to remarkable degree, even more so if a zoom lens was used.
Many urban surveys are flown at about 4000m.
Actually, atmospheric "noise" (turbulance, roiling, thermal variances) is going to limit the resolution possible. This is why the Hubble is in orbit. A good optics text will run you through the math; the short insightful summary is: you might be able to see the licence plate, but you won't be able to read it.
Well - if I have to put my money on either the US Government or Script-kiddies, my money's on the latter.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Their copyright seems fair. If you attribute where you got the images from it seems you can mirror them.
The wording is a little ambiguous, but I think you are supposed to email them and get permission first. Look at the bit in bold. That means YOU.
Have a read:
61 cm and not 60? Or did they mean 2ft. At least
the morons did not say 60.96cm.
In case you don't know about it yet, you can type in your address in Mapquest, click on "Aerial photo," and see a pictue of your neighborhood in which it's quite easy to pick out your own house. Best of all, you can pan and zoom all you want and look at landmarks around where you live.
In response to you and Greymalkin (above reply) it would seem that the astronomer does have it a bit wrong. Sun synchronous and geosynchronous (obviously) aren't the same thing. His description is of a sun synchronous orbit.
A satellite in geosynchronous orbit can only be one distance from the earth, that of its circumference (22,500 miles at the equator). At this distance the satellite orbits once every 24 hours, thus staying in the same apparent position in the sky.
With a geosynchronous orbit, it would be possible to get a steady video capture but the resolution would be measured in the kilometres, not centimetres.
---
I didn't want to leave this space blank.
Cars and trucks can be determined to make and model with about 20cm resolution (or less). Conventional optics physics tells us that the optimal resolution for even the best imagery from space is about 10cm typical. (possibly better if the platform is tasked to a lower altitude, but this is VERY expensive) Honestly there is no real advantage to going to higher resolutions from space. The issues being worked on concerning the folks that have the best technology (NRO, NIMA, CIA) are computer vision, (analaysts have to look at just about everything producing the real bottle neck in interpretation. Hell, I knew folks that specialized in runway lengths. They looked at images of runways all day, every day to determine lengths and capacities of runways), faster multi-spectral imaging, real-time visualization, better/faster tasking of platforms etc...etc...etc...
My educated guess is that Israel would be purchasing their imaging commercially and from the French and US governments as they have no real remote sensing platforms dedicated to spying that I am aware of, so it is highly unlikely that you saw classified data given that it is relatively tightly controlled.
As to mistakenly seeing classified imagry, the places I have been to would never allow mistakes like that to occur. Anybody visiting the facillity with less than collateral clearance would see red strobe lights on the ceilings everywhere reminding everyone that there are "visitors" present, computer screens would be blank or showing unclassified information, and accessible filing cabinets would be cleared. Even ones with locks on them. Visitors to the classified areas in these facillities (even congressional ones) are a major pain in the ass and a time consumer for those that work there and these visits are not well liked. Violations of protocol here will cost you your career, so most folks take things seriously.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I had an interesting thought while perusing these images: will there be a time in the near future where we won't be allowed to have these images?
:)
I mean, some reporter got threatened with a treason charge after photographing a nuclear power station - these photos would give me even more details.
Look at the image of the washington monument - I could wasily make a highly accurate map and use it for Very Evil Purposes (tm).
A good example of a state restricting citizen access to maps was the old DDR (GDR for you merkins). 'West' Berlin wasn't even on their maps, which also became progressively more inaccurate as you neared the borders.
At the very least, my bet is that the state has an interest in who buys high-resolution satellite photos, and from what areas...
(Gods, am I glad to live in Germany again
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
yeah, right, sure. Like MS are gonna fix it!
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
I'm not so sure these images are actually 61cm resolution. They look a lot like what happens when you over sample a lower resolution image, lots of fuzzy large pixels. Any way to tell for sure?
Earthwatch - and they're just up the road about 20 miles from Space Imaging. Glad to see they finally got a satellite up and working - they've been trying for years and have suffered launch failures and orbital failures.
thumbtack,
If you remember, someone leaked a photo of a KH-11 digital photoscan of a Soviet shipyard on the Black Sea back in 1977 with an amazing resolution of 30 cm or so. You can tell it's about that resolution because on that picture of the then-uncompleted Soviet aircraft carrier you could very clearly make out details of construction cranes next to the ship; the Ikonos and Global Imaging satellites would not resolve the construction cranes so clearly.
I'm sure with the latest sensor technology the latest recon satellites from the USA are capable of resolving down to 10 cm or less in real time.
(O)sama (BI)n (L)aden (WAN)ted.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Bummer.
Beta only seems to work for Google. Such a shame.
The first Improved Crystal was launched in 1990, followed by successors in February 1992, December 1995 and December 1996. Each Improved Crystal costs in excess of US$1 billion with a further US$400 million spent on launch costs.
Technical capabilities allow Improved Crystal to resolve square or circular objects as small as 10cm but linear structures of 5-8cm can also be detected. With this resolution the visible optical spectrum can differentiate uniformed people from civilian personnel and determine the size and carrying capacity of small vehicles or two-wheeled motorised equipment. Infra-red imaging allows camouflage and vegetation to be identified as well as natural surface flora modified by the presence of groups of several people.
I heard they could read the time off of a wrist watch if they wanted to. Probably just something someone made up because we'd be talking 1mm resolution, and with the atmospheric effects and all.. But still, it makes you wonder.
Com'on 61 cm? Marketing idiots!
love is just extroverted narcissism
Space Imaging's best offering is a 1m panchromatic resolution image QuickBird's resolution is 61cm at nadir (pointing straight down), but 72cm when pointing 25 degrees cross-track. IKONOS' resolution is 81-100cm (nadir - 26 degrees cross-track). So the resolution difference isn't as large as it appears at first. The reason to point cross-track is to get the revisit time down from 3-4 days to 1-1.5 days. SpaceImaging only sells 1m processed imagery (rather than 0.82-1m raw imagery) because they believe that's where the market is: they don't want other companies to buy raw imagery and undercut their processed imagery prices. DigitalGlobe obviously has a different business model. If selling raw imagery works for them, SpaceImaging may do the same.
Perhaps they do it with radio rather than light. I don't know the chips in my watch, and some of them even boast of computer connections. So perhaps they can read the time off of "some watches".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This is so cool.
I want a picture of myself from satellite to post it on hot or not.
All they have to do to make some quick money is take a lot of potentially embarassing pictures of dead civilians in Afghanistan, and then the Pentagon will buy the exclusive rights at the taxpayer's expens! (FOIA, anyone?)
"e" is "2.718281..." not "2.718282..."
That's the price I see on the site for the 256 CD collection of the continental US.
How long do you think before I can get it from Morpheus?
Metric units suck. Especially when they're inappropriate.
Anybody know how much these images cost and what their pricing model is? I was unable to find this information on the DigitalGlobe web site.
To use their image browser, you must download some silly plugin which only exists for Mac and Windoze.
What a crock. Why do companies do this?
...how good is the military satellites, I have no real knowledge of this. But I heard that the same contractors who built the Hubble Space Telescope built the current generation of U.S. military eyes-in-the-sky, so I would assume that it is as good or better than the Hubble. And yes, I know the Hubble cannot image the Earth but I'm sure that there is a version that can filter the light to a usable level. I imagine that it can see very well even on the dark side using IR. Probably count the change in my back pocket on a dark night. From geosynch orbit, 24x7. Hell, they may even have a gigawatt laser attached.