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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.
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?
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
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
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?
These satellites usually follow a sun-synchronous orbit. Basically, this is a polar orbit (meaning that the satellites fly over the north pole, the equator, the south pole, the other side of the equator, and then back over the north pole). One of these rotations happens every 101-103 minutes. Now, the beauty of the whole thing is that during the orbit doesn't fly over the same spot of the equator every time... it moves a bit. This bit is almost equal to the distance that the earth has rotated in those 103 minutes... thus, the satellite always follows the sun as works its way around the earth.
This orbit strikes a good balance between maximum sun exposure (useful for taking pictures), global coverage, and revist time. Half the time it's in dark, the other half it's taking photos at noontime.
Being in the light all the time would require a much higher orbit (near geostationary) that would make the optics work much harder. Since the satellite would be moving much slower with respect to the earth, the revisit time would also greatly suffer.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
In the Washington DC picture, you can see the Pentagon and it's definitely missing some "rings" on its west wall :-(
=="(almost) anything that you can see in these photos you can see in person. If people from other countries are seeing it, they could see it in person for the price of a plane ticket and a good excuse to get a visa."
Other than many military installations which are surrounded with razor wire fencing, this is true. I'm mainly worried about those installations.
=="I've heard other people raise this argument before; "doesn't this help terrorists/rogue states"? Think about it, genius."
First of all, I am 'thinking about it'. How does commercial sat pictures _help_ us? I cannot come up with at least one convincing answer.
=="Do you need an aerial photo to aim an ICBM at NYC? Did the terrorists need to research the area around Manhattan to figure out that the WTC is located there, and they should fly the plane in that general direction? Honestly, what the hell can you do with this?"
First you have to see terrorism in the terrorist eyes. If I remember correctly, our local television news programs have 'exposes' that detail the lack of military awareness of chemical factories. In our area, there is a military surplus of many types of nerve agents. The news mentioned what the facility was called. Now if some rich terrorists were to look at a map and determine where this was, they could buy a sat map and know the outer schematics of this plant.
Also, be aware that some military installations are NOT on maps. the only way to see it is to get past the guards with nice SMG's (yes, the last time we passed through, they were carrying that type).
=="Also, I'd have trouble believing that the Chinese gov't is not aware that the US has the ability to peep at them with about 50 different satellites. I don't think they are suddenly going to become aware because Joe User posts pics online."
Maybe I didn't explain what I considered that bas scenario. The US knows about China's (fill in the blank), however the US hides that knowledge from us for certain reasons. There is NO need to know about a nuclear reactor at coords x,y or other such stuff. This type of data should be seen as need to know only. All we should care about is if the military is doing thier job.
=="As for pictures of US military installations, what is there to see?"
Like I said above, there are some installations that positions are itself marked as a rating _under_ classified but still not released to the public. Pictures of these places are nothing but deterimental
=="Anything that they don't want you to see is hidden underground, and the government restricts private remote-imaging firms from releasing data less than 24 hours old. So if you're Osama Bin Laden, you might be able to get a pic of the B2 that just bombed your ass taking off, although about a day late."
So you told me something I didn't know. I wasn't aware that such a law exists.
=="Use your head."
I am, are you?
Josh Crawley
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.