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.

Comments

Privacy implications

[Flarners]

Holy cow, you all better get your tinfoil hats ready, because they really *can* and most likely *will* be watching us with these things! With Ashcroft's increasingly McCarthyesque persecution complex and our civil liberties being eroded away in the name of "national security" on a daily basis, you won't even be able to jaywalk without being spotted by one of these evil mechanical eyes! I bet the FBI is going to put a huge megaphone on every one of these satellites they shoot into space, so that as soon as you break a law, they can shout down the "word of god" from above, causing you to freeze in fear as the thought police zero in on your location!

</humour> (in case the absurdity of this post and all the exclamation marks didn't make it entirely clear)

distributed Osama hunt

[Frothy Walrus]

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?

Here are some of the images

[GNU Zealot]

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.

Re:Sweet!

[Greyfox]

Yeah! I can see my house! Hmm. This was taken at noon! Why is my manager's car in my driveway? Maybe I can see in the window with this magnefying glass...

Seriously though, I should start selling advertising space on my roof now. "Get your business seen from space!"

You don't think the gov. can do better than 61cm?

[Anonymous Coward]

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! :)

Re:Ugh!

[morcheeba]

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.

Re:You don't think the gov. can do better than 61c

[BWJones]

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.