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Ikonos 1-Meter Resolution Earth Images from Space
Attack Pirate writes "Colorado based Space Imaging will release their first 1-meter resolution pictures from space in a press release here. The images are from their brand new Ikonos spacecraft and they'll be available for purchase. I've had a peek at some sub-sampled stuff and am very impressed with the quality. You can see ... well, just wait until 11:30 PM Mountain time and see for yourself. Backup sites are newswire.spaceimaging.com and www.businesswire.com (click on "Today's Photo Wire"). " I'm going to be tracking a lot of people's movements with this now.
Given how the US government banjaxed GPS so that it doesn't work as well for the rest of the planet, it's good to see tech like this get through. "But supposing the Despot of the Week get's hold of the images?" I can hear the whines starting already.
As for the 1984 fears: I think they're unjustified. People's privacy is much more at risk from street cameras and bosses monitoring their email than from an eye in the sky. I don't know how much you'd have to pay Ikonos to track someone for ten minutes, but I imagen it'd be more than your average PI would be willing to pay. And the governments of the world have no need for private satellites; they've mostly got their own.
Let's disspel a few myths about satellite reconnaissance, like the absurd notion of motion tracking. Firstly, these satellites don't use video cameras, but high resolution linear CCD's, not entirely unlike those found in a desktop scanner. Just as your scanner needs to translate the CCD along the length of the page to produce a 2D image, it's the motion of a satellite along its orbit that produces a 2D image from a 1D sensor. And again like the scanner, it's inherently inappropriate for capturing objects in motion. Secondly, any such satellite has a very fixed path dictated by the altitude and inclination of its orbit (in this case, low orbit for maximum detail and high inclination, nearly polar, for widest coverage) and the rotation of the Earth...as such, the "revisit time" for a satellite to cover any given point more than once is measured in days to weeks. There are minor exceptions, such as some satellites which may point off-nadir on subsequent orbits, but with fuel being a most critical and finite resource, this is a seldom-invoked luxury. But even in this special case, revisit time is still well in excess of an hour, and thus of no use in real-time tracking.
Or this notion of watches, newspapers and license plates being read from orbit. Urban legends, the lot. There are upper limits to the ground resolution possible with satellite imaging...limits to the purity and accuracy of the optics, bandwidth limitations in simply extracting data from a high-resolution CCD and transmitting it elsewhere (ever seen your scanner overflow and 'back up' at high resolutions? Can't do that with a satellite), and of course the atmospheric limitations...not just the wobbles from refraction, but very simple things like haze and clouds...air simply isn't all that clear. The theoretical and ultimate limit is estimated to be about 15mm...still totally inadequate for even the license plate story. What's more, it apparently simply hasn't occurred to some people that license plates aren't installed on the top surfaces of cars, but on vertical surfaces at the front and/or rear. If we go all out and assume such absurd high resolution is possible anyway, acquiring such images would require an extreme off-nadir angle, which would put the target several hundred or thousand miles more distant. Not only do more distant objects subtend a smaller angle on the sensor (covering fewer pixels), but now there's those several hundred miles of extra atmospheric haze and distortion to contend with. It's simply not an option. Such stories are most likely bastardizations (and still overly optimistic) of what's possible with aerial reconnaissance from planes, in which nadir angle, distance, and atmospheric phenomenon are less an issue.
Then there's the simple fact that it takes a considerable amount of time and manual intervention to process and prepare this data for distribution...it's not like there's a pipe coming out of the satellite and straight to the web. The amount of data in these images is simply enormous, and it requires inordinate work and time to acquire, process, convert and archive all this information. Even the "freshest" images may be weeks to months old. Nobody is going to see whether you're home right now using this technology. Nobody is reading your license plate. Nobody is tracking your location. Life isn't an intriguing and action-packed episode of the X-Files. Get over it.
Jesus I wish Slashdot authors would stop feeding everyone's paranoia.
1-meter resolution is *hardly* anything to get worked up about. They *might* be able to tell if your car is parked in front of your house or not. 1-meter resolution is insufficient to detect the very *presence* of a person, much less that person's identity.
There are also few legal issues to worry about. It's generally held that anything out in the open/public is fair game as far as photography is concerned. If you wish privacy, take your activities in private.
These images are also *very* static. You aren't going to be able to track the movements of *anything*. Assuming the camera takes a picture of the same geographical reason a second time, the time between the first image and the second will be months if not years. There aren't evil people sitting in bunkers everywhere watching live video coverage of you getting up in the morning and driving to work. Who the fuck cares about your boring life? Get over it. There is no privacy concern and no conspiracies going on here.
... their camera is getting a good picture of their web server going up in flames under the enormous geek induced load these pics are causing.
If anyone can get in and mirror a few, please let me know.
When Reagan sold off the LANDSAT program to the private sector, a company named something like EEOS (I honestly don't remember) bought the thing, then started selling the images back to the public. The last LANDSAT that worked (one was lost) was something like IV, and it had (among other equipment) a 1-meter res imager in a couple of bands.
LANDSAT VII (Launched or about to be launched) should be back in the public domain, and will provide similar res images in a great many more bands (200+ iirc).
Amazing how you can apply what you learning in Geoscience!