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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.
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.
</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
Now they will be able to see the big board!
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?
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..."
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.
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
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.
Yeah but a lot of the photos on Terraserver out very out of date. If i zoom in on my address our neighborhood hasn't even been built yet.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
...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.
what studies? where?
If you're going to make assertions like that then back them up with cites.
dave
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
<i>... and a nasty criminal record that he doesn't deserve.</i>
<p>
I always thought that <b>undeserved</b> nasty criminal records were for people who didn't commit crimes. How about "nasty criminal record that he didn't expect" or just "nasty criminal record".
... less than 3 minutes after posting.
This has to be some sort of record.
you think they saw this coming?
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!
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.
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
I'm involved in trail planning, and could use this. GlobExplorer's imagery is several years old.
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!
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
...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"?
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.
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
But by the same argument you can say USGS info or some Rand McNally map could be used for evil purposes. The problem (governments know this) with banning stuff is you only drive up the desire to have it by those who want it for something nefarious. If say some government said you couldn't have high res satillite photos the demand would skyrocket for them and people would get them anyways. Stuff being illegal doesn't mean it disappears. Of course this is theoretical. Somebody could come along and say Digital Globe and Space Imaging couldn't conduct business anymore and block them from rental time in control facilities. It would prevent you from getting an accurate picture of a building in a time period of 24 hours. You could just as easily get somebody with a GPS receiver and a camera to gather intel on something. Most bans on anything are politically motivated rather than truely safety motivated.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
SpaceImaging charges 55$ per sqkm with a minimum of 100 sqkm. So for those highly optimistic useful 50 images a day they're making 5500$ each. That's half the figure you came up with. Now for the kicker. Many organizations are buying many hundreds of sqkm all the time from arial recon companies. Why? Farmers can use the data to figure out how well their crops are doing, knowing where water collected after a rainfall tells you where you may or may not need to water the next week which saves you lots of money in both equipment and man hours. If you can save a 100,000$ worth of crop for spending 20,000 you just saved yourself 80% of what your loses would have been. State governments can spend a couple grand every year to inventory public roads. Not all uses for arial photography require a single precise image taken every five minutes. SpaceImaging is just complimenting a business that lots of organizations already use.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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.
Dropping the war on drugs is only slightly less absurd than dropping laws against murder.
That statement is only slightly less absurd than saying that drug use is only slightly worse than murder.
Drugs destroy families, friendships, and lives
So does alcohol. At one point, it was prohibited as well.
why should our government encourage their use?
What, if it's not forbidden it is by definition encouraged? Everything not prohibited is compulsory?
Disclaimer: I don't use alcohol or drugs.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
Look at the image of the washington monument - I could wasily make a highly accurate map and use it for Very Evil Purposes (tm).
Homeless people sell maps that are just as accurate at the exit to the Smithsonian Metro stop.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
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.
Metric units suck. Especially when they're inappropriate.
Yes. Even if you had the resolution to read them (61cm = 24inch, that's (1/24)dpi, you'ld need at least 2dpi to read it), license plates can only be seen from close to horizontal views. So if you want to see LPs on a satellite image, you have to tilt it, and shoot from a much higher distance (meaning even more resolution needed), with a lot more atmosphere between (meaning much fuzzier image).
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
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?