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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.
Actually, we'll probably always have to deal with the blimps, unless the stadium is on the equator. The only satellites that can be geosynchronous (stay at the same point over earth all the time, ie 1 orbit = 24 hrs.) have to be at the equator. So, if we wanted to get rid of the blimps, then we couldn't have a satellite over the stadium at all times. But hey, maybe someday there will be so many satellites in orbit that there always will be one over the stadium...
devoted a small patch to growing marijuana.
Jesus, how much pot did he need? To be viewable from 450 miles away, the put feild must of been a *bit* more than just for his own consumption. When you know that each meter is one pixel, and it takes more that a few pixels to determine that it's indeed marijuana, then there must of been at least 10 square meteres of the stuff - and thats only ten pixels. Sounds like he was trying to pay off the bank loan for the new tractor with the proceeds.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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?
because, as much as i don't care for terrorism, i also don't care for my CPU cycles working towards creating precedent so someday they can call me a terrorist and find and kill me.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
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