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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.
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?
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.
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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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