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"Google Satellite" To Be Launched This Week
Lord Satri writes "Well, almost. Google signed an exclusivity deal with GeoEye regarding GeoEye-1, the most advanced high-resolution, civil, remote-sensing satellite to date. This must be annoying for other high-resolution, remote-sensing data users since Google already has an exclusivity deal in place with DigitalGlobe, the other major civil satellite imagery provider. From the CNet article: 'Under the deal, Google is the exclusive online mapping site that may use the imagery... in its Google Maps and Google Earth product. And as a little icing on the cake, Google's logo is on the side of the rocket set to launch the 4,300-pound satellite in six days from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. GeoEye-1 will orbit 423 miles above Earth, but it will be able to gather imagery with details the size of 41 centimeters... Google, though, is permitted to use data only with a resolution of 50 cm because of the terms of GeoEye's license with the US government.'"
Google Chrome and now GeoEye. Wow, I could have had Google Stock instead of all those V-8's ! I should have..
Is a Google satellite evil or not evil? Discuss.
John
Some precisions on my summary. DigitalGlobe is obviously not the only other remote sensing data provider, but it's GeoEye main competitor in civil high-resolution multispectral remote sensing. GeoEye is itself the merging of two other previous major players on the same playing field, OrbImage and Space Imaging.
As for my claim of an agreement between DigitalGlobe and Google, see this two years old entry. The original archive for the DG message is here (the link on /geo does not work anymore).
One of the obvious questions that comes to mind is to which extent these exclusivity deals have negative impacts on other remote sensing imagery customers, small or big.
Another question is; does Google really needs such a deal to provide the best webmapping and virtual globes-related tools?
Animoog.org
50cm restriction? do they have something to hide??
Shiny new browser that can do everything and fancy new satellite. The only thing missing is my new RFID implant.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Google starts plans for Moon base and Mars base, right after the space elevator is completed, and the new high power laser defense system the army is working on gets better than 19% efficiency. (to combat alien intruders) Oh, and they need the flying cars as well to round out the high tech glory.
Plus new Mars and Moon search services will be launched. Find your future lost relatives on Mars or the Moon.
Monkey boy is yelling and smashing chairs against the wall again:
"I'm gonna f**king KILL google!!!"
Within 1-2 years other countries will have civilian spy satellites that break 50cm, putting American companies at a disadvantage.
The USA will have 3 choices:
Shoot the birds down, literally.
Shoot the birds down, politically - bully the other countries into imposing similar limits.
Lower or eliminate the artificial limit.
Anyone remember when encryption software was considered a munition? Apple and other companies had to go through hoops to export it, putting them at a distinct disadvantage over non-American companies.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Sunbather search... Bikini excluded
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
Though at the time.. it was just a April Fools joke..
...it will be able to gather imagery with details the size of 41 centimeters... Google, though, is permitted to use data only with a resolution of 50 cm...
I'm not really sure how this breaks down in terms of what I can actually SEE. Since current imagery lets us sorta see people, I'd like to know how much further along are we to seeing _a person_.
Can anyone provide a little more detail, maybe a good example.
And please - no examples using libraries of congress worth of hogsheads of dat tape traveling in the back of station wagons or any somesuch..! ;)
GeoEye-1 is scheduled to launch aboard a Delta II rocket from Vandenberg AFB Sep 4 11:50am PDT. However, unconfirmed reports state that the launch may be delayed because Hurricane Hanna has grounded east coast support personnel.
Guy comes out of bar holding a girl's hand while walking home. Suddenly, a targeted ad for condoms is projected on the ground in front of them.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
resolution of 50 cm?
What's up with that?
Top secret military sites?
I'll be honest and admit I am no expert, but a 4300 satellite must be very expensive to launch to that altitude.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
My understanding is that at 50cm resolution, an object that is 50cm across would appear as a single pixel on the image. So, a manhole cover in the street might show up as a single pixel at that resolution. A car's hood might be four pixels, etc. Objects that are smaller than 50cm should not be detectible, especially if they are close to the same color as the background. However, if you zoom in on almost any American city to maximum resolution on google maps's satellite view, you will clearly see traffic lines. Traffic lines are roughly 10cm wide. Often these resolve to two pixels.
So, either my understanding of satellite photo resolution is wrong, or Google can already go to 10cm, and possibly even 5cm resolution.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Is that anything like pirate eye?
Still not enough to find my keys! :(
Defining optical resolution from space is a bit tricky, as several generations of optical engineers have discovered.
The main criterion is the telescope's point spread function - this is roughly the angular diameter that a pinpoint star appears to be, as seen through the telescope. We want the smallest point spread function, and it should map onto about one to three sensor pixels. (arguments go here about over/undersampling).
The Fourier Transform of the point spread function is the Optical Transfer Function, which is a graph of the spatial frequencies response of the telescope. It's analogous to a hifi's frequency response ... it's an engineering challenge to prevent high frequencies from getting rolled off.
The main limit for high resolution is the diameter of the primary mirror (All mirrors and optical elements, no matter how perfect, have diffraction effects which spread out the light and reduce resolution. The bigger the entrance pupil, the greater the resolution) For the GeoEye, orbiting at 684Km and a resolution of 0.4m, I roughly calculate the primary mirror is somewhere around a half-meter diameter or so, depending on the wavelength of light it's optimized for.
Other things limit resolution - scattering of light in clear air (Rayleigh scattering) screws up the image, especially in the blue. Dust, haze, clouds and urban pollution are a bother, but not as much as you might think. Naturally, there's lots of image processing software ... quite compute intensive.
A typical human, seen from above and not casting a shadow, is about 20 to 60 cm across. So someone walking down the street should appear on a few (1 to 5) pixels. Not enough to recognize someone, especially since you're looking down on 'em.
Generally, images taken from aircraft have better resolution (they're closer, and there's less Rayleigh scattering). Perhaps airlines will attach automated, downward looking hires cameras to their daily flights.
This is good news. Google Earth is one of my favorite applications, but I have been frustrated by the resolution of many areas outside of cities. I will have to do better at hiding my secret nuclear missile silo though. :-)
I did RTFA but nowhere did I see any information about which orbit they're going to use.
It can't be geosynchronous because that wouldn't allow them to photograph all of the country at once. In order to cover the whole US, they'll need to have an orbit that passes the satellite over different parts of the country at different times.
The interesting thing is that in order to get such an orbit, it has to pass over other countries. Will Google take footage of other countries? If so, will it use that footage? That would probably require some intense international negotiations.
Shouldn't You expect more from your DJ?
From the discussion I'm reading (not here exclusively either) it would appear that everybody thinks that any one having a superior position in the market is evil. Sorry but by that definition I want the most evil company on the planet. Cornering the market on a commodity is the time honored method of gaining ground on the competition. After all a competition has both winners and losers. It would appear you all don't want a competition you want a communism where everybody shares the market equally with no one having any advantage. Sorry folks that's not how it works. Get over it folks we live in a capitalist economy there will be losers and there will be winners, quit whining. Look up the definition of Competition.
Why bother
when it WAS a munition? Have you looked at the legal requirements recently for selling a program containing encryption, internationally? (perhaps, including something as simple as libSSL on an iphone application)
*tags it as theunblinkingeyeofgoogle*
I was just referring to the Chrome logo as that - and then this happened. Serendipity, I say. Heh. Or, at least, synergy.
If you charge an insane price for satellite photos, your customer will just launch their own damn satellite. Btw I think what they mean is the size of one pixel is 50cm on the ground. That kinda sounds about right for a high res satellite pic. And finally, I can realistically say that it uses "pixels the size of cats!" Sorry SNES emulator graphics, but they get the title.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
The diet coke of evil
Folks like Intermap and some of the lidar scanning folks have 6cm data sets available. While not photorealistic, it's great for 3D mapping ... which is one probable direction for future mapping services anyway.
when google exist? Hm.... wasn't there an AI learning from search engine data... bzzzt... ^HUP
of a song:
I always feel like somebody's watching me...
Most satellites for earth observation use sun-synchronous orbits. These orbits let the satellite's cameras take pictures ob objects at the same solar time. This means that it will pass overhead at the same local time every day ... so the images will have the same shadow characteristics.
You accomplish this by making the orbit precess exactly 360 degrees per solar year.
These orbits are typically nearly circular, but needn't be; you can put a spy satellite into a sun-synchronous elliptical orbit, so it'll swoops down and photograph near perigee, then waste a lot of time around apogee.
Since this orbit is around 684 Km, it can be shown that it must be pretty close to circular, has an orbital period of around 100 minutes, and its inclination is probably about 96 to 100 degrees (meaning that the satellite is slightly retrograde - 90 degrees inclination is polar, zero degrees is equatorial) In turn, this means that pretty much all of earth will be seen by the satellite, except for 8 degree circles around the poles.
A 96 minute period means that each successive orbit will look down on a place 15 degrees west ... one time zone to the west.
Geosynchronous orbits are pretty useless for this type of work, since they're so far away (you need really big telescopes to get much resolution). Also, you'd only see one hemisphere, and half the year it'd be nighttime over the areas you want to see.
Now they can really their googlegulp data without my tinfoil hat getting in the way.
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.- Shelley
At first glance I thought it said "Georgia Satellite". I was wondering what took them so damn long...
/and keep your hands to yourself...
Flamebait
Serious inquiries only.
I keep hoping that Google will start releaseing some of their data into the public domain/GPL/Creative Commons.
That Google spy van must be gathering data like speed limits, which streets are one way. Maybe even which are paved and not.
You're right for StreetView (you can still use Google's StreetView data in OpenLayers.org for example), otherwise, Google Maps/Earth licenses data from others (Tele Atlas/NAVTEQ/DigitalGlobe/GeoEye/etc), so they are not the ultimate geodata owner (yet? ;-).
One place missing GPL application is a really good navigation system.
Yes but... do you really need this? When you'll buy your GPS-enabled navigation system (e.g. from Garmin, Magellan, TomTom, etc), you'll be given appropriate software that works with the hardware you just purchased (even the iPhone has (in dev) it's turn by turn nav syst software). You don't "need" to install an open source nav syst.
That said, I agree, a solid open source nav syst would be nice. Roadnav is an example, but I think it's not as mature as commercial offers. The data for such an open source software project already exists on OpenStreetMap.org.
Animoog.org
This is the first node in their cluster of orbiting brain lazers. Next thing you know they'll be holding the moon for ransom.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
// Google, though, is permitted to use data only with a resolution of 50 cm because of the terms of GeoEye's license with the US government.'"
Surely this only applies to US territory, and they can use higher resolution images of other places...
Come to think of it, the US takes pictures of other countries without their permission all the time, why shouldn't google take any pictures it pleases? If something is out in the open you can hardly claim it's private anyway.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Seriously, how much difference is there in 41cm imagery and 50 cm imagery? Is this talking lens size, like a camera (e.g. 35mm, where a different lens size can make a big difference) or is it maximum resolution of objects on the ground?
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Are they like over a metre, like a parking meter, or around 20 centimetres, like a gas meter, or what? And is there an international reference meter somewhere?
"Google, though, is permitted to use data only with a resolution of 50 cm"
Awesome I can now see my X-woman's thong from outter space?
Like doctors.
IAAMD and let me tell you that, indeed most of us doctors could manipulate a soldering iron (except maybe for psychiatrists). You just have to realize that it's mostly like routine work, except that this peculiar patient has less tendency to bleed.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If Google started offering the publishing of peer-reviewed journals for free, including print copies and mailing, with the only caveat being that the journal remains indexed and accessible via journals.google.com, I am sure within a very short period of time the current profiteering academic journals would go the way of the dodo bird. Then again, this kind of seems like what they are going for with knol.google.com, except maybe a bit more formalized and peer-reviewed.
Looks reasonably round and not out of place to me. Care to elaborate?
This is good. Google Earth has room for improvement. Maybe they can catch up to Microsoft V.E. This will improve our mapping for gps tracking devices.
Work smarter, not harder, with gps tracking
Personal runway just across the 101 for Sergey's 737.
wooh.... now google's spying on us. hey, maybe i'll be able to search myself playin my fiddle on the roof -_-. This is amazing technology. lets just hope they don't decide to abuse it.
The restriction will just come from a more or less arbitrary decision back in time and not be targeted at that specific satellite as some people seem to think.
What I am interested in, though is how they will be able to use 'real' 50cm shots. Will they do special rounds for Google and other customers? Anti-aliasing is not an option and I can't come up with anything else. So.. How will they do 'real' 50cm?
Even vague speculation highly welcomed!
and the pile of missing 2004 US election votes
Maybe they'll send you their search indexes.
Deleted
The Google satellite launch is postponed until August 6th.
Soon enough roof mounted license plates might be in order.