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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.
</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
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
Seriously though, I should start selling advertising space on my roof now. "Get your business seen from space!"
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
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!
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
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 :-(
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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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.
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.