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Space

DigitalGlobe To Sell 61cm Resolution Satellite Photos 244

Posted by chrisd from the bird's-eye-view dept.
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.
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DigitalGlobe To Sell 61cm Resolution Satellite Photos More

DigitalGlobe To Sell 61cm Resolution Satellite Photos

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  • "I can see my house from here!"

    Seriously, though, that's pretty darn cool. Pretty soon, we won't even need that stupid blimp over our favorite sporting events.

    • Re:Sweet! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by dytin ( 517293 )
      Actually, we'll probably always have to deal with the blimps, unless the stadium is on the equator. The only satellites that can be geosynchronous (stay at the same point over earth all the time, ie 1 orbit = 24 hrs.) have to be at the equator. So, if we wanted to get rid of the blimps, then we couldn't have a satellite over the stadium at all times. But hey, maybe someday there will be so many satellites in orbit that there always will be one over the stadium...

    • Re:Sweet! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @11:58PM (#2718350) Homepage Journal
      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!"

    • Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Informative)

      by ChazeFroy ( 51595 )
      In the Washington DC picture, you can see the Pentagon and it's definitely missing some "rings" on its west wall :-(

  • Ugh! (Score:2, Funny)

    by zulux ( 112259 )
    Does anybody know how long it takes these birds to make an orbit - it's getting aufully hard these days to bury the bodies without someone taking a picture.
    • I swear.. ssssooo many amateurs are trying to get into the "biz" without having the knowledge that they really should for such a sensitive topic.

      Has the movie Enemy of the State [cinemax.com] taught you nothing??

      "Don't look up."
      • It tought me that people will believe anything they see in some big budget movie. That they will get paranoid about it, yet totaly ignore that "they" can track their movement via their credit card payments and (even better) their cell phones.

        See that antenna on that building? They can tell you're close to it. Now they only have to wait a couple of hours till they can get one of their satellites to fly over you to get one image.

    • Re:Ugh! (Score:5, Informative)

      by morcheeba ( 260908 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2001 @01:31AM (#2718581) Journal
      These satellites usually follow a sun-synchronous orbit. [nasda.go.jp] 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.

  • NICE (Score:1)

    by skeebo ( 313473 )
    Will they release photos of the headlines they grab off the newspapers, or the details in it...
    Seems the technology is there, high quality optics, incredible zooming and fine digitation of the photos...how close IS close...??

  • Privacy implications (Score:4, Funny)

    by Flarners ( 458839 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @11:39PM (#2718272) Journal
    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)

    • The United States Military and Intelligence agencys probably already satellites with better resolution than this. You should have put on your tinfoil hats yesterday
    • "Holy cow, you all better get your tinfoil hats ready, because they really *can* and most likely *will* be watching us with these things!"

      Except for the fact that the satellite orbits the earth every 9 minutes, so you only get 1 picture every 9 minutes. Also don't forget that the earth is revolving below it (these satellites are in polar orbit, so the earth rotates below them). Which means it takes half a day for it to get to the proper latitude, and depending on the camera's angle, it may only be able to make 2 passes (that's 2 pictures, taken 9 minutes apart) before it has to wait 12 hours.

      So no, they won't be watching you with these.. and they never will until they can zoom in from geosyncronous orbit (30k miles). Physics is against them.
      • Slight correction:

        Aparently, this satellite is higher up than some of the other ones... so instead of a 9 minute orbit, it's a 93 minute orbit! It can only take 1 swab of an area per orbit.. so that's 1 picture every 93 minutes. (And it's FOV is 15km, you rotate further than 15km in 93 minutes, so they have to wait 3 days to get back to the same exact spot)
      • There aren't any satellites with 9 minute orbits around the earth. For fun, calculate the altitude that this hypothetical orbit would have. Wouldn't that be fun to look down on satellites racing by from the comfort of your first class airline seat?

    • Maybe you're joking, but you're right about Ashcroft's persecution complex and our loss of liberties, friend.
    • Obviously the post is intended as humour, and the orbit of this particular satellite effectively prevents this type of surveillance, but... If he can (and he probably can; we're not allowed to know even though they use our money for it), I am damn sure that our fascist government would do exactly this. We are only saved by the fact that computers have no ability to discern either positive identification or criminal intent from satellite photos. That means humans have to sift through all this intelligence, and the government simply doesn't have the manpower to do that on a large scale. So for now I doubt large-scale photointelligence operations are ongoing. But you know the very idea of watching everything every person on Earth does, every minute of every day is enough to get Herr Ashcroft drooling.

      To which I say, no problem, and proceed to fuck him in the ass with a railgun. Bye-bye, johnny.

    • ...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 [cia.gov]) 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 [imdb.com] in that.

      • Data rates . . . (Score:2, Informative)

        by Gis_Sat_Hack ( 101484 )
        Most of these satallites in polar orbits that precess with the sun line require three (3) days to return to the same position.
        Thus it would take three days to cover ALL the US, & so you'd only need 77.6 TB per 3/days NOT per second.
        Furthermore, there is probably a lo-res FOV of the order of about 1 pixel per 1 SqKm which is the FOV that covers the whole earth every 3 days.
        The hi-res 1 pixel per (61cm)squred FOV instrument more than likely has a keyhole FOV that can be targeted from the ground.

        The downlink data rate is prob about 4GB/hr and prob will continue for about 12 years (based on other similar sat's)

        Still, it's nice to the numbers. Western Australia is about 1TB uncompressed in R,G,B & Height.
      • Heck, let's see him find Will in one 61x61 cm^2 pixel ;-)

      • On a decidedly on-topic note, though, imaging all 9,629,091 sq km (according to the CIA World Factbook 2001 [cia.gov]) 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.

        Not a problem!

        Most of the interior of the North American land mass, that which is commonly called the "midwest", can satisfactorily be compressed at ratios of 100,000 to 1 with absolutely zero loss of significant data!

        Uniformity in the midwest compensates for coastal areas, where, um, "variability", exists that would otherwise inhibit a high, no-loss compression ratio.

  • Crap! (Score:2, Funny)

    by GKW ( 410846 )
    Now they will be able to see the big board!
  • Is it?? Damn that was fast!
  • I sure hope that the navigational computer isn't running on the same one as their server, because this would be the first time /. actually "brought down" hardware literally.

  • Anyone able to mirror these before the box went up in /. flavored flames?
  • Thankfully, I never go outside anymore, so until they get xray versions of these puppies I am safe.
  • Giving people the ability to spy on each other from several miles above the Earth is just begging for abuse. Imagine how much easier it is to be a stalker or an asshole cop nowadays; just watch your target for activity until they do something wrong.

    Incidentally, that happened to one of my cousins; he farmed several acres of land that were passed down from our great grandfather, and devoted a small patch to growing marijuana. One of the local troublemakers got into an argument with him once, and started watching him with a satellite imaging service (cf Enemy of the State). Sure enough, he mysteriously got turned in for growing pot by an anonymous caller and lost the entire farm. When he got out of prison, he went on welfare and has been living off the government dole for quite a while now because he has few skills and a nasty criminal record that he doesn't deserve.

    I really feel bad for him, and I think we should all oppose this horrible tool of surveillance before it is used against one of us.

    Bill

    • Re:This is a HUGE privacy threat (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Or we could not grow illegal substances in our farms.
    • 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.
    • Actually, I think that your story is really evidence that we should oppose the drug war. Although I agree that if the government starts using satellites to spy on its own people, it will be a sad sad day. I don't see a problem with individuals using the satellite images though, although when satellite images become more mainstream, the world will be a much different place.

      My condolences to your cousin though. He is perfect evidence of someone that could be a productive citizen, but instead is actually a drain on society through no fault of his own. The government keeps pulling this kind of crap, then they wonder why so many people are on welfare.
    • I wouldn't be too concerned about privacy, we can just submit a slashdot story about them each time they get on your case. Of course it would have to be accepted first.
    • You can always protect yourself against this type
      of invasion by blocking the line of site between
      the satelite and whatever it's trying to look at.
      But think of this. As more and more companies allow private citizans to access this information, it will be harder and harder to police what they are looking at and who they are selling the images too.
      In the US the major media networks have agreed not to show any images of dead Afghanis, and the government bought all the Afghanistan images from Space Imaging. Do you think it would make a difference if American citizens could see what was happening at groud level there?
    • <i>... and a nasty criminal record that he doesn't deserve.</i>
      <p>
      I always thought that <b>undeserved</b> nasty criminal records were for people who didn't commit crimes. How about "nasty criminal record that he didn't expect" or just "nasty criminal record".
    • Working with both satllite & airborne imagery, I can assure you that:

      a) can get *much* better photo from plane
      b) can pick out crop types (eg: yr mates pot) with right kind of filters. & can do this with higher res from light aircraft.

      To this day, most airbourne photographic surveys are carried out with large format traditional wet photography. The negatives are then scanned at desired resolution. A high res negative taken from 1000m altitude can be magnified to remarkable degree, even more so if a zoom lens was used.
      Many urban surveys are flown at about 4000m.

  • distributed Osama hunt (Score:5, Informative)

    by Frothy Walrus ( 534163 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @11:44PM (#2718297)
    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, as much as i don't care for terrorism, i also don't care for my CPU cycles working towards creating precedent so someday they can call me a terrorist and find and kill me.
      • First, they came for the Unabomber, and I said nothing because I wasn't a reclusive Luddite crank. Then they came for Timothy McVeigh, and I said nothing because I wasn't not a hyper-conservative nationalistic psycho. Next they came for Osama bi Laden, and I said nothing because I'm not a US funded expatriated Saudi mujahadein. At last they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out...
        • Well ...
          All of the information that I have about him passed through the government before I ever saw it. So how reliable should I rate it?

          That said, I believe that the preponderence of the evidence indicates that he, or anyway someone similar, is implicated. I've talked to eye-witnesses, and the Twin Towers event did happen. Beyond that ... beyond that I start having to trust people that I know to be liars. This gives me a quite queasy feeling. Life and death decisions are being made in my name by people that I don't trust, and whom I know to be liars. So what should I believe when they make some claim or other? For all I know Bin Laden is comfortably ensconsed in an Alexandria penthouse. And I don't mean Egypt. (That would be a quite insequre position, so I don't believe this for an instant, but that's belief, not knowledge.)
          .
    • Well. The latest statements seem to indicate that he's no longer in Afghanistan.
      It doesn't make the problem impossible but it's does make it harder.
    • 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.

      Is 61cm resolution also "more than enough" to detect movement of people BELOW THE EARTH, WITHIN CAVES?

      Just checking.
    • I'd imagine that for this particular problem, the bottlenecks are more with the sattelite time that's available, and (to a lesser extent) disk space. Especially for the government.

      Also, 61cm is no big deal to the government; the government has long had access to much better equipment than civilians have access to. The US govmnt has been doing this sort of thing since the 60's, it's only recently that it's become available to the public. This is partially because of government restrictions and treaties [biu.ac.il] (sorry for the old link, I haven't kept up on this sort of stuff), but also because of the costs involved.

    • Umm - you don't seriously think these images are produced in real time, do you?

      Maybe, just maybe, they could tell you where Osama was, last time the sattelite went overhead.

      Provided he has a big sign saying 'Osama' in 61cm pixels on his hat.

    • You don't think the gov. can do better than 61cm? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18, 2001 @12:42AM (#2718475)
      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:You don't think the gov. can do better than 61c (Score:5, Informative)

        by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2001 @04:24AM (#2718822) Homepage Journal
        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.
    • It may be good enough to track somebody, but it certainly isn't good enough to identify somebody. The point is, they don't know where Bin Ladin is, so trying to track him is kind of silly.
  • All links seem down, mirror?

  • And the "Lost" bin Laden! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Jeremiah Cornelius ( 137 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @11:46PM (#2718303) Homepage Journal
    If this is a publicly available commercial application, the NSA/CIA/etc. Have much better resources up their sleeve.

    These guys see him, know what side his hair is parted on, and how many rounds are in the clip of his Kalashnikov.

    • These guys see him, know what side his hair is parted on, and how many rounds are in the clip of his Kalashnikov.

      a) You mean 'magazine', not 'clip'
      b) Satellites don't have superman-style x-ray vision; and bin Ladin wears a turban; and steel doesn't transmit light.

      HTH.
  • Slashdoted already? Let's hope their quickbird can't take a touch more abuse.

    Always a bad sign when the website flakes out. Usually means no one loadtested it, and some programmer took a bunch of shortcuts and has some incredibly inefficiant design (it looks like everything goes through one script with all the question marks).

    Can you say yuch? Can you say no scalability? Can you say silly?

    Probably trying to be cool...
  • 0.61 cm per pixel is certainly not enough to read a newspaper headline, or even tell the type of cars/trucks on the road the colour swaths are impressive though. Too bad it was slashdotted immediately ;)

    For those of you who are really having a lot of trouble getting anywhere with the link, I can tell you from the 2 or three I downloaded before all hell broke loose they aren't that much more impressive than the 1m resolution ones.

  • Terraserver [msn.com] has aerial photos of the entire country for free. You can look up your address and everything.

    Maybe composite aerial photos aren't quite as cool as satellite photos, but who cares? It's free.

  • Here are some of the images (Score:5, Informative)

    by GNU Zealot ( 442308 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @11:52PM (#2718330) Homepage
    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/ [guh.nu]

    These images are probably copyrighted by digitalglobe.com so um, yeah.

  • A link with info...... (Score:3, Informative)

    by tiwason ( 187819 ) on Monday December 17, 2001 @11:54PM (#2718336)
    Here is a link to some info on that sat.

    http://www.eurimage.com/Products/qb.shtml [eurimage.com]
  • I think it's time to stop sunbathing nude on the roof. Alas.

  • Is this really the best? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by thumbtack ( 445103 ) <thumbtack@@@juno...com> on Tuesday December 18, 2001 @12:14AM (#2718394)
    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.
    • Ever since I can remember, what the general public knowledge is, usually runs about 10 years behind the times.

      Your 10-year theory may hold for satellite imaging technology, but it seems to me that one of the most important measures of progress or technology doesn't really lag at all for the private sector: CPU power.

      Is the military able to get their hands on supercomputing or number-crunching power that the private sector will need to wait 10 years for? I doubt it. SETI@home may be one interesting example, but private entities with enough cash (and some can give even military budgets a run for their money) can buy as many supercomputers from Cray, IBM, NEC, Fujitsu, etc. as they need.

      This probably didn't bother the military 10 or 20 years ago. But today, having the ability to encrypt, decrypt, process photographs, extract signals from noise, etc. can create or win wars.
      • Dude, you are so blind. EVERYONE knows that the "Pentium" was state of the art in 1971, when the US government was finally able to reverse-engineer the computing technology of the scout ships that crashed in Roswell in 1947. Intel is a front through which the Majestic 12 have been releasing CPU technology to US industry over the last 30 years. Moore's law is fine and dandy for civilian applications, but you've got to realize that the government started out light-years ahead and has had a much higher growth factor in the last 30 years. A single state-of-the-art military CPU probably outclasses the combined computing power of EVERY computing device in civilian usage.

        Open your eyes...
    • 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.

      Um, 30 cm resolution *might* be good enough to tell that he was holding something about the size of a driver's license, but is not going to be good enough to make out what it is he's holding, much less what's written on it.

      Fer f@ck's sake, anybody who blathers on about satellites being able to read a newspaper and that kind of crap needs to actually look at one of these images. At 1 meter resolution you can make out a car. Not what kind it is, just the fact that there is an object which, given that it's basically rectangular and located on a road or parking lot, is most likely a car.

      It's going to need at least 100-1000x more detail than that to be able to read things. I'm sure the militar has got much better than the private sector, but are they *that* far ahead? Maybe. And maybe they really are test flying alien UFOs.
    • 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.
  • Shouldn't the images be less angled than this? If the satellite is 423 miles above the surface, then shouldn't I see the tops of buildings and less of the sides? It looks like Ultima 5.
    • It is matter of how much they are willing to pay. To have the opportunity to get a nice "straight down" angle, you gotta pay the big bucks. If the satellite is passing over Guatemala, then it is cheaper.
  • I can finally find that %$#@ frisbee I threw up on my roof ten years ago!

    Hm, look at that, I'm getting a little bit thin up top...

  • Got Linux?!?!? (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by mcrbids ( 148650 )
    This site has an "Interactive Gallery" that my NS 6.2 on Linux browser is "unsupported" with!

    Anybody want to flame these people?

    -Ben

  • ... less than 3 minutes after posting.

    This has to be some sort of record.
  • Correct me if I'm wrong... but resolution doesn't mean a thing if the image quality isn't good. If the image itself isn't very clear, the resolution won't matter. Is this a true 61 cm per pixel image -- or rather, a faux resolution... I can make a 1 m image have 61 cm resolution, but it won't change a thing. Still an ambitious attempt, though.
  • No wonder the server died a horrible death, the links above are using a secure server!

    It works much better if you use just a standard http access.

    Try this: http://www.digitalglobe.com/?goto=gallery [slashdot.org] instead and stop torturing tose poor servers.

    Maybe this article will get updated URLs soon?

  • I may be much for technology, but this kind of thing comprimises US national security. I live here in the country (aka, not city) so things like airplanes crashing in our house is'nt a problem. This sub-point is that I'm safe from extra-government actions.

    What it comes down to is; if we can buy pictures of 64 cm= 1 pixel, so can terrorists and enemy countries. The US military made this type of device in the Cold War so they could SPY on other countries for intelligence (however mainly USSR at the time). Now, they're used in large intelligence missions over enemy territory so that OUR soldiers don't get killed due to lack of mapping.

    There is a good basis for the US military to have this technology, but what are the pluses for non-military to have this? Other than the sake of knowing, not any. They aren't valid survey techniques, you pay surveyors that. Home camera's make good security systems, sat cams don't.

    The negative's come at a distinct disadvantage. Say a US civillian is interested in a Chinese nuclear power reactor and pays for sat scans. Then they post it online, which I believe this has been done (can't remember site). If the Chinese gov't find about this, don't you think that they would be slightly miffed off at the US? Or how about taking pictures of US military installations? Those are dangerous to the saftey of US citizens, Military and non-military.

    Josh Crawley

    ps: I'll probably be modded down, since mod's here dislike anything but the typical knee-jerk , no matter how well a disagreeing is written.
  • Orbital was working on the quickbird and earlybird satellites [ucl.ac.uk] (the names got changed around as schedules, ahem, moved). At the same time I was also working on our tractor-trailer tracking system. I figured that if we could save a lot of money if just ditch our GPS/cellular tracking hardware and put giant bar codes on the trailers, and track them visually with the satellites. But, alas, we only had 1 meter resolution and even with a 53' trailer [state.or.us], there wasn't enough room for a suitable bar code. But, with this better resolution, my plan's now feasable!!

    Fun fact: giant shipping companies lose one or two trailers a year each because they don't know where they left them.

    p.s. patent pending. Ok, not really, but if anyone tries this, please let this post serve as evidence of prior art.
  • Assuming you don't need a custom camera run, what's the pricing? Can't find that on the site.

    I'm involved in trail planning, and could use this. GlobExplorer's imagery is several years old.

  • A little perspective here on privacy issues... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Honorbound ( 521347 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2001 @01:28AM (#2718574)
    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!
  • As an astronomer, I've always been pretty impressed with these military/commercial imaging satellites because they basically use the technology we use to look up at the skies, but instead to look down at the earth.

    Here's a quick intro to the technology for those who aren't familiar.

    Basically, these companies (or the air force) send a 1-ton spacecraft up on a large rocket (made by Lockheed Martin generally) and put in in geosynchronous orbit around the earth. These orbits are something like 500 miles above the earth, which means that they orbit the earth once every 1.5 hours or so. (you can try the math if you like, F=ma, a=v^2/r, a=GM/r^2)

    They specifically put it into what's called a "sun-synchronous" orbit -- which means that its orbit takes it alternately over the light and dark side of the earth each half of the trip. And wherever the satellite passes over the earth (on the light side), it will be approximately 10:30 am. (if you have trouble visualizing this, draw a line in your mind from sun to earth, then align the plane created by the satellite's orbit vertically with this line.)

    So every orbit, the satellite traces out a wide swath of territory it can take pictures of (like peeling strips off a potato). These swaths are perhaps 10km wide, and can extend for 100s or 1000s of kilometers in length. Note that it can take pictures straight down if it wants, or it can aim to the side slightly. This is why satellite pictures may not look like they were taken from directly above, but rather from the side a little bit. Black and white images are standard, color will take longer of course.

    So it turns out that with these satellites, every place on the earth will eventually pass beneath the path during daylight, and will be able to be imaged. They will give you statistics such as "Revisit frequency is 50% of the earth within 24 hours, or 100% within 3 days, more if you don't require the satellite to be directly overhead". (This is used to plan observations, or to tell imaging clients how soon a target can be seen, which might be important for the military, for example).

    Pricing of the images is of course based on recovering the development and launch costs, so individual images will be pretty expensive. Custom tasks are even more expensive. But remember, the satellite is continuously taking images (it's not waiting for clients), and they store the data for future use.

    So far, the only kids of satellite imagery have been still-images, but many speculate that live video has been possible for several years now (like in "enemy of the state"). I'm quite sure the us military has this capability, but I myself have never heard a definitive response on this question... Hope you find this useful!
    • Uh how exactly do you propose getting live video from an orbiting satillite? In a sun sync orbit a sat would pass over everything far too quickly to even take a handful of concurrent frames of video let alone something with apparent motion you could call "video". There isn't much need to speculate about true video like from a hack movie.
  • 1) Orbital satilites orbit (well, duh, otherwise they'd fall on your head!), and as such, they are unsuitable for stalking someone. Exception is Geosync orbit, see below)
    2) (civilian) imaging sats are in LEO for a couple of reasons, first, the closer you are to the earth, the better resolution you can get with the same imaging equiptment, just like the closer you are to your object with your camera, the bigger it appears, and you don't need a zoom lens. Since the amount you can get for a sat pict varies in relation to the amount of detail you can offer, commercial sat providers have a vested interest in LEO, secondly, a LEO sat allows the company to sell pictures of everywhere (eventually), and thus a better customer base then if it's constantly pointing at Washington DC.
    3) Retasking (altering a sat's orbit in order to aquire your image sooner is _expensive_. Due to atmospheric drag, meteor showers, etc, Sats shot up are equiped with manuvering thrusters to allow them to stay in orbit longer. Obviously the fuel has to be shot up there with the sat, and therefore each sat has a finite lifespan in direct relation to the amount of fuel the sat has. I would speculate that a commercial oranization (and indeed the govt too) organization would be loath to retask a sat and thus lower its lifespan.
    4) 65cm is a lot of space. Realize that each 65 cm space is a pixel. So your face would be less then a pixel. Pretty hard to ID you based on that.
    5) Looking through a sat is like looking through a drinking straw. Say you were looking for Bin Laden. Even assuming you were looking through a sat with arbitary resolution, you're only going to get a small swath of image. Say 10km across. If UBL is sitting at km 11, you'll never find him.

    So calm down a bit folks, it's not the End Of The World As We Know It. This product is useful for people like weather forcasters, famers, builders, desaster recovery folks, etc. People whose target is big, and not going anywhere in a hurry. Noone's gonna be reading your paper over your shoulder witht his sat. If they do, they'll see 2 white pixels for the newspaper, and one black one for your hair maybe, assuming you have black hair. I think they'll have to buy their own copy of the New York Times.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • ...before some enterprising company ditches the satellites and offers drone shots with much higher resolution. The drone technology is nothing new. If the area is hostile, you can use tiny disposable drones [aerovironment.com]

    From a technical standpoint, none of this is very exciting. The only real limitation is what your government will allow you to sell to the general public. In some cases, the government will do it for you [noaa.gov] with a camera on a regular old plane.

    Of course, the other issue is privacy...

  • Cool satellite images (Score:2, Informative)

    by Vess V. ( 310830 )
    In case you don't know about it yet, you can type in your address in Mapquest [mapquest.com], click on "Aerial photo," and see a pictue of your neighborhood in which it's quite easy to pick out your own house. Best of all, you can pan and zoom all you want and look at landmarks around where you live.
  • Earthwatch - and they're just up the road about 20 miles from Space Imaging. Glad to see they finally got a satellite up and working - they've been trying for years and have suffered launch failures and orbital failures.
  • Space Imaging's best offering is a 1m panchromatic resolution image QuickBird's resolution is 61cm at nadir (pointing straight down), but 72cm when pointing 25 degrees cross-track. IKONOS' resolution is 81-100cm (nadir - 26 degrees cross-track). So the resolution difference isn't as large as it appears at first. The reason to point cross-track is to get the revisit time down from 3-4 days to 1-1.5 days. SpaceImaging only sells 1m processed imagery (rather than 0.82-1m raw imagery) because they believe that's where the market is: they don't want other companies to buy raw imagery and undercut their processed imagery prices. DigitalGlobe obviously has a different business model. If selling raw imagery works for them, SpaceImaging may do the same.
  • Why'd you say 61 cm? Why not say 2 feet? According to units, 61 cm = 24.02 ft. Given that two feet is a nice round measurement, and that 61 centimetres is not, I hazard a guess that the resolution is, in fact, the former.

    Metric units suck. Especially when they're inappropriate.

  • To use their image browser, you must download some silly plugin which only exists for Mac and Windoze.

    What a crock. Why do companies do this?

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