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Ikonos 1-Meter Resolution Earth Images from Space 144

Posted by Hemos from the fun-with-commericial-imaging dept.
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.
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Ikonos 1-Meter Resolution Earth Images from Space More

Ikonos 1-Meter Resolution Earth Images from Space

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  • While 1m satelite imagery could be INCREDIBLY useful for a lot of things, I doubt that it would be all that usefull for tracking an individual on foot. First of all as was mentioned, the refresh rate has gotta be low. Second, these are LEO (Low-Earth-Orbit) satelites, which meens that they are moveing over the earth at a very high rate of speed. Meening that your TOT Time-Over-Target is not very long. Third, 1m is not good enough to pick one person out of a crowd, even it thay do happen to look directly up. It might be possible to track a car, but even this would be difficult due to the the (persumibly) low refresh rate.
  • There is a significant difference.

    In 1984, The Goverment can track everyone, but no one can track what The Goverment is doing.

    In Ikonos case, everyone can use its data to check on anyone, including goverment and big corporations.

    If you offer me a choice to live in socity where no one (including big corporations) has any privacy, or society where goverment and big corporations have all the privacy they want, I'll take the first one without thinking for a second. Because if they have privacy, the next second you do not have any and they still have it.

    Therefore Ikonos in a long run is a good thing for privacy.

  • Image stabilazation and averaging can increase effective resolution, but that doesn't mean that there aren't items decreasing effective resolution. The trick is to add them all up.


    ...phil
  • The 7 centimeter number ignores atmospheric effects, which is what adaptive optics compensates for. If you don't compensate for atmospheric turbulance, the number is worse.

    7 centimeters is the absolute limit for a Hubble-sized mirror.


    ...phil

  • The brother of one of the guys I work with works with military satellite technology. While debugging the software on one of the sats, he took a picture of his motorcycle. Resolution was good enough to read the license plate! And this wasn't a blown-up picture, either.

  • FYI (Score:1)

    by Nass ( 96235 )
    - Am doing an exceptionally short story for Jane's Intelligence Review on this. SPOT is 10m pan, the Russians (Kate) is 2.5 m pan and Ikonos is 1m pan. The restrictions on the latter are sensitive US sites and Israel, where the data is downgraded to 2m. Interesting enough, Saddam has just bought a whole slew of imagery of his neighbours (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Syria) from the Russians.
  • I've colorized the full-resolution photo in Photoshop (simple level adjustments). It's great for desktops, if you've got the horsepower to cut it up. If anybody's got an FTP server that can hold and serve a 14.5 MB JPEG image, send me an e-mail. I'll upload it *once* and post the URL...

    I also have 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1280 pieces of the image that I cut out for my three monitors.

    (No, I can't cut or process anything else for anybody; I have to get back to work.)

  • The Blackbirds are at Davis-Monthan, I think. Not the graveyard part where they chop up the airframes for scrap; they're carefully mothballed for the next time they're needed. They've already been out of service and back in again for Desert Storm.

    And what the other guy wrote abt the synth-ap radar, that makes sense. Lake Murray is mostly less than 100 feet (~32 m) deep, and I do know that multiple images of the same target can be composited using software to get a synthetically sharpened image with the "noise" reduced. Still, when I heard abt using radio-wavelength ANYTHING to image thru water, I about flipped.

  • Well, I've only been able to see ONE pic and it was on Businesswire.com ... these don't look any more detailed than pictures I download all the time from Terraserver.com.

    I'll check again in a few days after their server recovers ... hopefully the businesswire photo is a poor representation of the detail level.
  • Although Ikonos has the sharpest photographic resolution of any commercial satellite, it still can't resolve an image less than 1 meter square. This puts its images in the same class of the USGS aerial photographs, such as those available at terraserver.com. Although buildings and roads are recognizable, and trucks and buses can be distinguished from cars, the resolution is simply too large to detect, let alone recognize, people. So, privacy advocates need not worry much; Big Brother is still very nearsighted.
  • Until AI develops advances to the point that a computer could track an individual cheaply and efficiently, such surveillance is still going to require significant manpower, which means that in practical application, the "common joe" certainly has nothing to worry about. This technology is going to be prohibitively cumbersome and expensive for a few years still to come.

    Personally, I'd be more worried about the tiny surveillance devices (cameras the size of match-heads, and so forth) that will no doubt be hitting the consumer market all too soon. Amateur surveillance worries me a lot more than surveillance from the Faceless Government Conspiracy.
  • However, the government has had other satelites since the 1980s that can read license plate numbers on automobiles.

    And your evidence for this is?


    ...phil

  • The press-release says that the atellite is in sun-synchronous orbit, so it stays between the earth and the sun. But it also says that it orbits the earth every 98 minutes. How can this be, if the earth spins once a day?

    I'm guessing that half the time it's noon and half the time it's midnight. Would this mean that the camera can only take pictures of a given place twice a day? Doesn't sound too useful for tracking a person. Somebody check the shadow on the Washington Monument and figure out what time it is.

    This thing could make for some really neat time-lapse animations of building constructions, tides, etc...

  • Kind of scary that they'll be selling the pictures. If it's pictures of cities, and populated areas, I'd be worried that people could track movements of others [not that anyone would care about mine, but it's the thought of it all]

    Not much that you can do to stop it though, seeing as how you're allowed to take pictures of wahtever you want [unless someone decides to copyright that] ;)

    Just my .02

  • Yikes! (Score:1)

    by tedx ( 9710 )
    Amazing, yet scary. Who needs Selective Availability GPS when you can have a target with optical pattern recognition?
  • Sorry bout the double post - -wasn't paying attention, and hit submit twice :(
  • Seriously, unless you're talking current .mil systems, this is the old stuff we used to use. While it could track if you controlled it, you're more likely looking at the stills on a predesignated area, which would be great for Bill G to display on the wall screens of his home as people enter the buildings, or maybe for finding a Sasquatch (if you knew where it would be), but not for much else.

    Give me a hovercam any day ...

  • Technology overcomes paranoia (Score:3)

    by rde ( 17364 ) on Tuesday October 12, 1999 @08:48AM (#1619972)
    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.
  • But if this becomes a trend, and more companies put up satelites, then prices drop, etc...

    I don't think it'll be something that we'd need to worry about for another 3-5 years, but after that, who knows?

  • TerraServer uses low-res USGS EROS photos, some of which are 10+ years old.

  • Yeah, the SkyDome(tm,etc) in Toronto isn't even finished in that picture.
    --
    Chris Dunham
    http://www.tetrion.com/~chameleo/index.html
  • Old pics yes, but they are also at 1-meter in a lot of places. (my city included)

    So is the big draw to this new service the fact that they have "new" pictures and not necessarily detailed ones?
  • Maybe not off-topic, but definitely off-base. :)

    I've never heard of doctors not being able to
    take pictures, but I think if that's true, it
    falls under the "doctor-patient" privilege, like
    attorney-client privileges... They can't share
    what you discussed in private, and they can't
    share pictures of what you're suffering from...

    IKONOS is different, it's just taking pictures
    of the world, like anyone else can do. If you
    don't want your picture taken, don't go outside,
    kinda like the celebrities...

    -WW
  • 1Meter resolution isn't enough to identify humans, even if they're laying flat on the ground.

    Umm, I can make out lines on the highways. People laying on the ground have a bigger profile than a highway line. You may not be able to recognize them, but you'll be able to see some of them. The JPEG compression on these images is terrible, too.
  • Optical theory says that a Hubble-sized diffraction-limited telescope pointed at earth from the Hubble orbit can resolve no better than 7 centimeters, ignoring atmospheric effects (which in reality cannot be ignored). This is based purely on mirror size, and assumes that you are looking straight down. 7 cm may well be enough to handle the missile situation you have described, but is not enough to resolve licence plates (except for maybe if you have one or not).


    ...phil
  • Eosat took over the Landsat (Landsat 4 and 5) program and eventually became the sole US supplier of IRS (Indian Remote Sensing) imagery from IRS-1C and IRS-1D.

    Space Imaging took over Eosat a few years back. Now Space Imaging sells Landsat 4 and 5, IRS-1C, IRS-1D and Ikonos data among others.

    Landsat 7 was launched earlier this spring and data is supplied through the Eros Data Center in South Dakota. More info at http://landsat7.usgs.gov. Landsat7 is the closest thing to open source remote sensing data. It has a pretty cool licensing agreement. Once an image is purchased (at about $600 system corrcted per scene), the data can be freely distributed by the buyer.

    Some stats...
    Ikonos: 1m panchromatic, 4m multispectral (R,B,G, NIR)
    Spin-2: 2m pan (Russian data on film dropped by parachute). That's the stuff on terraserver. Digital imagery is MUCH better than film.
    IRS-1C/IRS-1D: 5m Pan, 25m multspectral, 180km Wide Field
    Landsat 4: old
    Landsat 5: Thematic Mapper (not sure of the resolution)
    Landsat 7: Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) 30m multispectral, 60m thermal

    With one meter data, you can see a car, truck, missle launcher, tank, etc. The only way to see a person would be if the person was a few meters wide.
  • Some of the TerraServer photos are actually taken from aircraft.


    ...phil

  • ... (Score:2)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 )
    Hey look at grid 0E2FCC08 everybody! It's Rob - and he's being photogenic in his underwear! *g*



    --

  • These are new and from space. You haven't been able to get commercial 1m resolution images from space before. The stuff on Terraserver are aerial photos from planes.
  • Privacy protection in the United States is extremely third world when compared to that afforded citizens of most other developed countries. Companies routinely SELL one another comprehensive data about us, including our likes, dislikes, interests, and purchasing patterns.

    Other countries (such as Germany for example) have very strict laws regulating just how personal information may be used, and severely curtailing the dissemination of the aforsaid information. This sort of regulation, protecting the privacy of the individual, is not only appropriate, it is desperately needed here in the United States and elsewhere. To imply that a satelite snooping into your back yard or through the skylight of your house (or through the roof, if they've got infrared) is the same as glancing across the street at someone entering a grocery store from a public walkway is disingenuous at best. To then argue that therefor any additional or modernized regulations to protect personal privacy is pointless is itself absurd.

    The technology which has been developed in the last fifteen or twenty years to allow people to invade one another's privacy would have been unbelievable even a generation ago. Unfortunately legislation to protect our private lives from the prying eyes of corporations, government, or simply rude, snoopy people has not changed significantly in that time. Public apathy, coupled with an appetite for gossip and snooping, and powerful lobbies (broadcasters and direct mail marketers to name two) have helped insure that our privacy has been wittled down to almost nothing. If a satelite taking pictures of some topless sunbathers in the privacy of their own back yard will elicit public interest in this issue, then by all means start taking some pictures!
  • North is to the right of the monument.
  • "DMV will require license plate numbers on the tops of vehicles." Makes me glad I own a convertible :^) Unless they require it on the hood (!)
  • And my house, right there... Looks like the chimney needs cleaning again!

    I'm really looking forward to going home now, and mowing obscene messages into my lawn.
    "Heeeeeere's jabber!" Ha!

    Everyone can now log in and see if I'm going bald yet. Great...

    Ok, I'll be the first to say it... Imagine a beowulf cluster of those puppies.. Like a huge disembodied compound eye, floating around in space.
  • Ahh, aerial VS satellite ... good point.

    I still don't see any "Enemy of the State" implementations just yet.

  • Yep, the National Reconnaisance Office -- yer tax dollars at work. :)

    Movies necessarily jazz up the presentation and create some false impressions thereby, but the NRO's "national technical means" are, well, pretty darn good. Although anybody who actually uses the stuff has signed an agreement saying they won't discuss or divulge performance capabilities of their toys, it's not unheard of to be able to ID specific persons (the right-shaped blur in the right place at the right time), and there have been some rumors about extremely-long-focal-length sats able to read license plates. (Hell, I heard somebody brag once about being able to read the Titleist logo and count the dimples on a golf ball, but that's millimeter resolution -- that doesn't seem likely.)

    At wavelengths other than the visible EM spectrum, the capabilities get even more interesting -- like being able to tell what's at the *bottom* of a shallow body of water using radar. (Sounds like rubbish to me, but somebody swore that on a radar-sat image, he could see a crashed WW II B-25 Mitchell bomber at the bottom of Lake Murray in South Carolina. Personally, I think he looks at clouds a lot and says, "I see a doggie, a duckie, a Backfire bomber, and a fnord.")

  • I wasn't aware that the Russian's were using airplanes for their SPIN-2 project in the early 80's. :-)

    The SPIN-2 on terraserver is satellite imagery, the USGS is aerial photography. The USGS is sharper.

    You can read about them at http://terraserver.microsoft.com/ter ra_where.asp [microsoft.com].

  • Yabbut whom do you suppose underwrote the development of the technology to do this in the first place (if not the very images presented as examples)?

  • It is "fucking bullshit" that the cops can arrest you for doing something illegal? ok you da boss.

    If you want to be able to grow "herbs" in your backyard don't bitch about a new method of getting caught. Work on changing the laws to make it legal.

  • The imaging software is designed so that the controlling agency can upload "blackout" coordinates which would prevent imaging of a particular geographic area. It's not just a filter, but the imaging camera would actually be turned off during scans that fell within the boundaries of these "blackout" areas.
  • ..then we'd have to call it 1-yard resolution. Eh, it's close enough ;)
  • Sorry, I'm too lazy to look up the orbital data on this bird, but it's obviously in low earth orbit. I seem to recall about 400km. How are you going to track anything small with it? It's orbital period is pretty low (i.e., speed over the ground is pretty high.)

    Making some crass assumptions:
    (Note - all numbers are in SI. Interplanetary Spacecraft builders please take note.)

    Satellite's orbit is circular

    Height above Earth's surface=400Km
    Gravitational acceleration at 400Km~= g at surface ~=10m/s^2
    Radius of Earth ~=6400Km

    This gives an orbital distance of 6800Km = 6.8*10^6 m
    a=w^2*r
    => w^2=a/r

    Plug some numbers in:

    w^2=10/(6.8*10^6)
    => w= 0.0012 radians per second.

    1 radian at Earth's surface = 1 * radius = 6.4*10^6 m.

    In 1 second this satellite does 7700 m. That's fast.

    Backing up a bit, it'll do an orbit in 2 * pi / 0.0012 seconds ~=5200 seconds ~= 87 minutes.

    (Sanity check - this feels a bit fast, but is well within an order of magnitude of the expected result)

    So how are you going to track *anything* with this? All your target has to do is hide for a few minutes (I'm too lazy to look up the field of view of the satellite) every 90 minutes and you'll never see it.

    This is a very best estimate. Again, I'm too lazy to look this up, but this assumes that the satellite is in a polar orbit, and your target is at one of the poles. Otherwise your flybys will be at best many hours, and possibly days apart. Also, I doubt it's results through cloud are much good.

    Nice desktop pics though.

  • 1 meter resolution doesn't strike me as a significant threat. Unless you decide to go in for blaze orange body suits, tracking individuals will not be easy.
    ===
    -Ravagin
  • Actually the government seems to have learned how to market the Landsat 7 stuff. We've been talking to them about purchasing some imagery. The problem is that they have very little of what we want that isn't completely obscurred by clouds.
  • Many have commented on the 1-m resolution of this spacecraft. This does not mean that each pixel is one meter. In fact, for best results, you usually want 2-3 pixels per resolution element. The reason is the the Nyquist frequency (the fastest you can distinguish details) is a factor of two off from your sampling frequency.

    What this means is that if you have 1-m resolution with 0.5-m pixels, it is just a good quality as 0.5-m resolution with 0.5-m pixels. The reason is that if your resolution matches your pixel density too closely, then the fact that pixels are discrete (or quantized, you might say) becomes very relevent and the image does not look smooth.

    Also, I'd link to post a link to the TerraServer [microsoft.com] web page which has older pictures covering a LOT of the United States.

    Forgive me for promoting a Microsoft page! :-)
  • 1m resolution isn't that high. You'd get better with an instant camera taking snaps from a Cessna at 1500 feet. But this will eventully photograph the entire Earth's surface (unless it's cloudy - living in UK has some benefits).

    Also, you can be sure that military/government organisations are getting much better resolution. If theirs isn'tat least an order of magnitude better (0.1m) I'd be surprised.


  • iSoap! (Score:1)

    by mclem ( 34313 )
    Even more disturbing -- scroll down the BizWeek page a little and note the story on "Imagery-Driven Fragrance Products are Everywhere These Days ... Including the Kitchen Sink!".

    Hey... isn't that dish soap in iMac colors?

    Carumba! It's iSoap! Quick Steve, call the lawyers!

    http://www.business wire.com/cgi-bin/photowire.pl?101299/bw1.jpg [businesswire.com]
  • I have a magazine (paper) that says it doesn't take pictures
    of individuals. It is also said that it will cost
    $30 to $300 each picture, and you have to spend a
    minimum of $1000. I couldn't access the link, so
    sorry if this is said there.
  • I've got a couple of those X-10 wireless video/audio sender/receivers. They operate on 2.4 GHz and whenever I get radar scanned (or operate my microwave) the picture and sound get hosed. I've been scanned (apparently from the air or space since I live in a gulch) only twice in a 2 month period.

  • Paranoia Control (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 12, 1999 @10:49AM (#1620015)
    Wow...the story's just a few minutes old and already the Slashdot Black Helicopter Conspiracy Theory Brigade is on it like flies on crap.

    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.

  • I think this is more along the lines of Big Brother giving away his old eyeglasses since what he has now is so much better! Kind of like unveiling the SR-71 when it was already at least one (Aurora) or two generations obsoleted. Obviously the capabilities of military imaging systems are classified, but it's safe to bet that they are a *LOT* better than 1m resolution!
  • IANAL but strangely enough you can't photograph some buildings because they're copyrighted works of art. So if you're really paranoid, stay near "pretty" buildings!


    _damnit_
  • Umm, I can make out lines on the highways.

    But they aren't as white as they are in real life. Have a look at any of the images and those building with white roofs are really white compared to the lines. What is happening is that for each pixel, i.e., one meter square, it is an average of the entire pixel, so the white in the lines contributes to the entire pixel showing it as grey. So, if you are really paranoid, you could just wear black and walk the roads, or any other color to match your surroundings, and you wouldn't be distinguishable. Perhaps that will mean black will be the new black, or whenever another color becomes the new black, all of the paranoid/fashion conscious people will have to buy some paint the same colour as there outfit and paint everywhere they go.... just a suggestion.

  • Looks like a bus is making an illegal turn at 11th and Pennsylvania Ave.

    The next generation of photoradar?
  • This low-orbit satellite orbits between 6 and 7 thousand miles above earth (roughly 1 earth radius). From this height, you can see the entire earth. If the satellite took a picture of the edge of the earth, it would see nothing but the sides of buildings.

    We know that these pictures are taken from a great height because the perpective is orthogonal -- parallel lines look like parallel lines, and do not converge visually to vanishing points.
  • Of course, if the Hubble looked near the Earth, Moon or Sun the optics would rapidly burn out. Other spy sats (e.g. Keyhole series) are probably not as sensitive as far as brightness goes.
  • The one metre is when taking the pictures on an angle, ala to the sides, but when facing straight down the performance is much better. Also at the sides of the image the distortion due to a number of factors, lens distortion, refraction..., means that the accuracy at the corners is less than that of the middle. The error function is a spherical one.
  • This is not the same as geostationary.

    Ikonos orbit is tuned to precess (to change plane of rotation) synchronously to Earth orbiting the Sun. The plane of orbit does not stay the same due to not ideally spherical shape of the Earth, this orbit is a nice hack to use this 'not a bug, but a feature'.


    This way it is never in shadow and is always passing over the object at the same time: morning and evening. This is a standart orbit for spy satellite (although not the only one possible). Not only the pictures are made under the same favorable light conditions which makes interpretation easier, but you also never loose solar power.
  • While the hubble telescope is a great telescope, do you really think that if NASA had the budget of DOD, it would be the LARGEST scientific telescope we would have in orbit?

    I am not an authority, but - IMHO - With a larger telescope and image enhancement software, I'll bet they CAN read the license plates, probably even tell you if your tags are expired at that! This 1m stuff is old tech for DOD.
    -stax
    /. poster #104543567

  • And 1-meter resolution images of most of the continental USA have been available very inexpensively from the USGS in both print and electronic form for years.

    We should worry about things that matter, like being able to call up a credit card company and getting all sorts of private account details just by knowing the card number and the zip code.

  • This is not the same as geostationary.

    I didn't say that is.

    but you also never loose solar power.

    Wrong. The earth doesn't move too quickly with respect to the sun (1 revolution every 365.25 years). If a satellite remained directly between the earth and sun, it would be more or less holding still with respect to the center of the earth, so by definition it couldn't be orbiting.

    This satellite orbits around the earth in a north-south direction, following meridian lines through the poles. Therefore, it's either noon or midnight directly under the satellite. The plane of orbit rotates at the same rate as the earth's period around the sun: 365.25 days.
  • err...umm..hate to tell you this but :
    Radar images are use pretty often to image the bottom of the ocean or to track ocean currents. SAR (synthetic aperture radar) data can be used to identify and resolve subs below the water surface too..provided theyre not too deep. So yes, the radar below the water thing has been around a while..pick up a copy of IEE mags and you'll see DERA work going on in that with impressive results. And SAR can punch thru clouds. SR-71 photo equipment could "distinguish a golf ball on a putting green" from a quote i read.
  • I don't know about wearing black paint, but you're right about pixel averaging. My mistake!
  • Now I just need my high-powered space based laser.

    Cut me off in your gas guzzling SUV with one person in it, will ya!

    Besides, they only say that the turnaround will be 1 week, that's not enough to track movements. Chill. The Gubment is already tracking you.

    Quick... DUCK!
  • Not that I'm naive enough to believe what I see in movies, but I thought that the technology was already there and in military use?



    - Xabbu
  • Not true. Many states outlaw the commercial sale of pictures of individuals without their consent, as do many countries. It doesn't matter if it's in space or on the ground - it's still illegal. Not that it's easy to prosecute.

    You could always put a sign on the top of your car and your house stating:

    "You do not have my permission to photograph me. Should you do so without a proper court order, you hereby agree to pay me $1 billion per picture per person who sees said picture, per viewing minute.
    Signed ... (your signature)"

    Of course, they'll probably repro your signature and do a reverse trace on your car and house to get your credit info and suck your bank account dry and take out a loan on your house, but it's the thought that counts ....

  • Does anyone see the irony in the fact that IKONOS' first image happened to be of Washington? I have this sense of foreboding...
  • Looks like the AC found out that a latency effect applies both to posting and to viewing space-based images. Sure, you could track movements, if you knew when and where they were going, but with a one week latency in delivered images, it wouldn't help much.

  • i think the point is that the technology to produce these kinds of images and the images themselves are now available for _commercial_ use instead of strictly military applications

    imabug
  • ... No, sorry, this technology is not useful for tracking somebody's movements or similar types of surveillance. The repeat rate is too low because of the low orbits these sensors must use. I spose with enough money and fuel you can do something like that, but I doubt OI has that kind of capability on Ikonos. Still, your local police department can definitely check up on your backyard and see if you're putting up any illegal crops ... enough of a threat to privacy.
    --
  • This is getting pretty scary. There is no limit to what technology will be able to do in the future. Better and better images are only years away? Can this stuff be regulated? Once we are recognizable on the images, shouldn't our permission be required in order for our images to transmitted on the Internet for millions of people to see?
    It just gets scary if you think about it. Imagine a web site that lists famous people's coordinates and instructs psychos on the times that their favorite celebrity's picture will be taken and broadcasted on the Internet. I should have absolute privacy both inside my home and behind my fence. The Big Brother from above should not have the ability to take my picture when I'm in a private place.

  • GBF security (go by foot) (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    one meter bw res, four meter color res isn't enough to really make out people with any accuracy. (that means everything in one meter or four meters is mushed together into one pixel) No people -- just cars, trucks, trains, houses, pot farms, shrubbery, giant hemos-hamsters, etc. -k
  • Makes *ME* glad I ride a bicycle.

    Unless the require me to shave my head and paint a reg # on my pate...

  • the cops are now allowed to use highly sensitive heat imaging techniques when spying on your house. Its constitutionality has been tossed around, at first a court ruled it illegal, but recently a higher court said it was cool. Its fucking bullshit that the cops can do this shit.
  • Hell, I heard somebody brag once about being able to read the Titleist logo and count the dimples on a golf ball, but that's millimeter resolution -- that doesn't seem likely.


    I've heard comments to that affect but I believe they were talking about imagery from aircraft, specifically the SR-71 (which they claim is no longer in use).
  • Think security through obscurity. It does not work.

    In Soviet Union it was impossible to get a decent map of *ANY* area. The intention was to keep good maps from spies. Only high ranking officials would be able to get detailed maps. The nasty side effect of this was that invading German army had much better maps then Russian low ranking commanders. With predictable consequences.

    I bet Ikonos will not sell you pictures of "sensitive" areas in US. But I also bet that it would be better if they did.
  • I believe the image you're referring to is an aerial image of San Diego's Lindbergh Field. Those images were used for calibration purposes while designing the image processing algorithms.
  • You are right, the plane of orbit is indeed rotates at the same rate as the earth's period around the sun. Sorry for not writing it in a way that is easier to understand. Not sure about Ikonos, but it is *POSSIBLE* to choose an orbit when a satellite will pass each point at let's say 9am and 9pm.
  • There has been quite a bit of talk here about how 1 meter res imaging can't read a license plate (if it was flat on the ground), can't resolve a human being (past the shape, anyhow), pixel "blooming" etc...

    It was also mentioned that spy sats can't be larger than the shuttle, so the mirror can't be larger for the CCD array...

    However (and I am not an engineer or a satalite designer or anything), I want to throw out some ideas...

    It was mentioned that the sats use a method similar to scanners to make the images - by using a 1 by x pixel CCD with optics, and moving the satellite to "scan" the image - now, you may not be able to make the mirror big in diameter, but what if you make it long and parabolic (think of a half-pipe shape, almost as long as the shuttle bay, nearly the diameter of the bay, with an equally long CCD element at the focus)? Could something like this make a good imager?

    The second thing that we are assuming is that the gov't is only using one satellite per image - but what if they had two (or more?) sattelites, trailing each other in the same or near same orbit, and they angled the imagers in a bit - then scanned the same area - the images could then be reconstructed as a stereo photo, which would reveal even more information and detail about what was being viewed...

    Does any of this sound plausible?

  • How useful... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    OK, these scenes are going to be expensive, and they will have a low sample rate. It could be as low as once every 30 days (and if you want more, they will charge you for programming data collection.) By expensive, you could be looking at up to $4000 for a scene (the sites are overloaded, so I cannot check prices). Assuming you have a use for these products, the fairly narrow band the image makes (40km ?) means you have a good chance of missing the bit you are interested in - the targeting might not be that good. The good old geoid can make things waver about a little. The images shown so far are panchromatic - black and white. That is fine for counting cars and planes and missiles, and for checking up on urban change but anyone wanting to do earth resource monitoring (especially agriculture monitoring, wich is one big market these guys will be after) will find that the data resolution is going to be more like 5-8m perhaps (yes, Mars Global Surveyor might be better ;-). Of course, the pixel size (spatial resolution) is not the only thing besides acquisition, price, repeatability. The thing people really care about is the spectral response of the instruments. At the high prices, you are not looking at making pretty colours, you are attempting to divine the makeup of the surface below. So you need know if you can work out how dry the soil is, how much chlorophyll there is etc. from the data (see the point above.) How well this works in practice is moot. A problem with satellite images is the 80km of atmosphere you get in the way. In that you have thermal effects, pollution, clouds, haze, aerosols and all sorts of rubbish. That all has to be calculated (estimated) out. So what you get in the end may not be quite what you think it was. That is not counting corrections for the instrument characteristics (which change over time), the effects of geocorrection - as in twisting and warping of the scene to correct for both the motion of the satellite over the earth and the earth under the satellite. If you see a image before it gets geo-processed, it may look a lot different to what you end up with. Another thing you cannot do with these products is determine relief through photogrametry. Something you can do with airphotos. Which brings us nicely back to air photography. At these resolutions you might well find that air photography gives you a better resolution and perhaps does it for less money. You can pick your weather, to fly in, the scenes are accurate to 10cm. And you have a LOT less correction to do. You can even use sensors (film) that is tailored to your applicatin. For many purposes they should not be discounted. Oh yes, and you can spy using airphotos too. It is the reason the US MoD is still spending on UAVs, U2's and their successors. Satellites have their place like all things. Just don't believe all of the hype around them.
  • This has been available from (of all people) Microsoft, on their TerraServer site http://terraserver.microsoft.com/ [microsoft.com] for quite a while. Not only that but you can get a shot of just about anywhere in the US, and a few places in Europe too.

  • No more conspiracy theories! (Score:3)

    by Fastolfe ( 1470 ) on Tuesday October 12, 1999 @11:51AM (#1620054)
    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.
  • The Hubble telescope is the largest mirror (lens) that can be launched by the space shuttle. There is basically no launch capability for anything bigger. The KH-12 spy satellites were originally designed to be launched by the shuttle, so their mirror has to fit in the shuttle's cargo bay, thus the mirror cannot be any larger than Hubble. (Also, my original calculation did not say anything about aiming problems and telescope stability, both of which further degrade effective resolution.) It's easy to speculate about a bigger telescope, but there isn't any capability to put it in orbit.

    Claims like This 1m stuff is old tech for DOD. is FUD unless you have some real evidence to back it up. It's more likely that high resolution stuff is obtained by arial photography. Why not speculate on the capabilities of the Aurora-class hypersonic near-orbit jet that supposedly exists? That would be much better suited for sub-centimeter resolution photography.


    ...phil

  • Yes, you are absolutely correct, Mil/NSA equipment can resolve much better than 1 meter spec - one can even read your watch and tell you the make of it, as well as how far off your second hand is.

    But those sats are mucho expensivo - why do you think we keep the shuttle program around?

  • I wonder how they will treat sensitive sites?
    When i tried to get some information about Fort Knox (for some riddle) i got to see some of the paranoia still in effect on that subject. Essentially there was no map to be found with more than a general location of the bullion depot.
    (The exception being a James Bond movie :-)

    Now will one be able to purchase space shots of such sites? What about pictures concerning other countries security or privately owned sites? Who will have a say in this, and how will a right for privacy/security be evaluated ("Hey we won't compromise any 'good guys'!")?
    Consider the case when such photos are used in a terrorists attack, maybe on an airport.

  • Re:1984? (Score:1)

    by crt ( 44106 )
    These things move way too fast to actually be able to track a person. Until there are several thousand in the sky you won't have anything to worry about. Also, their cameras probably cannot send a continuous feed of video (at high quality) as would be needed to track something.
  • Since it's a slow download from some of those sites, I've mirrored the image on Business Wire of Washington DC.. It's at this link [tripod.com]...

    Sorry about the tripod popup crap.. It's handy for stuff like this though.


    ---

  • Legal to photograph Area 51 Nevada? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    IIRC, after much wrangling, the US and USSR agreed that no one owns space. This let both nations happily spy on each other from satellites for decades. Now the tech is cheap where small companies can afford to do this. What would the law say if this satellite was used to snap photos of the US-denied-to-exist facility near Groom Lake at the Nevada Test Site.

    Or better yet, ticket illegally parked vehicles from space! LAPD sat records show your vehicle parked in a handicapped zone at 12:34pm, 10/12/99. Next thing you know, DMV will require license plate numbers on the tops of vehicles.

  • Heh, heh. Neat how their first photos were of D.C. (where I work). Kinda of a shot across the bow of our local intelligence agencies, eh?

    ------------------
  • Should we regulate what you can see out your window, too? Or from a tall building?

    What if someone sees me going into this corner store? Nobody should be able to see that! We need more regulation!

    - Steve

    (What if someone saw me post this?)
  • It would be great to get a notification on a wireless device (PDA, cell phone, beeper, whatever) when I'm near an area "under surviellence". If someone is snapping pictures, the least they could do is tell us so we could pose a bit.
  • Just a thought, isn't a 1 meter resolution pretty bad? I mean, doesn't that mean that the relation is 1pixel=1meter^2 ?? Or is just me that have a slight brainfailure ...

    \\Peter

  • I wonder if ... (Score:3)

    by |DaBuzz| ( 33869 ) on Tuesday October 12, 1999 @09:18AM (#1620072)
    ... 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.
  • "(the right-shaped blur in the right place at the right time), and there have been some rumors about extremely-long-focal-length sats able to read license plates. (Hell, I heard somebody brag once about being able to read the Titleist logo and count the dimples on a golf ball, but that's millimeter resolution -- that doesn't seem likely.)" Marketing Snippet about the Keyhole 12-B aka IMPROVED CRYSTAL

    "The IMPROVED CRYSTAL's sophisticated electronics provides sharper images than the KH-11, comparable in quality to the best of the film return satellites, with a resolution approaching ten centimeters. A periscope-like rotating mirror reflects images onto the primary mirror, enabling the KH-12 to take pictures at very high angles of obliquity, imaging objects hundreds of kilometers away from its flight path."

    Last known launch: KH-12 /3 was launched on 20 December 1996 by a Titan-4 from Vandenberg.

    so who knows whats up there now.

  • Folks,

    At 1-meter resolution, it's still very useful for intelligence gathering. For one thing, at that resolution, details of buildings, manufacturing plants, airports, shipping docks, etc. stand out very clearly. 1-meter resolution is clear enough to see whether a missile silo is open or not, too.

    I'm sure that the major networks will use Ikonos to find the fixed military installations of the Iranians in the Persian Gulf (remember, ABC News was able to get SPOT imagery at 10-meter resolution that still showed clearly the anti-shipping missile launchers in Iran).

    However, Ikonos still takes time to process the 1-meter resolution image. Our latest spysats can probably resolve down to around 50 millimeter (around 2 inch) resolution, and will broadcast those pictures digitally in REAL time.

  • Re:Evidence (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Aviation Week (Av Leak) had a recent story about the next generation of "birds." The resolution of current optical satellites is given as 6 cm. Believe what you will about the accuracy of that number. It's consistant with novelists' claims of being able to see (but not read) liscense plates and New York Times headlines, as well as be able to tell that a person is a woman if she's at least a C cup. It also implies that the birds are diffraction limited (Titan IV fairings and others are bigger than the shuttle bay by a little).
  • Nyquist information theory requires factor 2 sampling of a signal to hold all of its information.

    pixelsize != resolution

    Therefore typically the distortion by the optical train of a telescope (= the effective resolution (diffraction) limit) is oversampled a factor 2 or 3 by the CCD detector.

    Ivo
  • With a GPS receiver, connect to Heavens-AboveGmbH [heavens-above.com]. This is the satellite predictions page changed locations and is operated by the German Space Operations Center. This URL is the current one.

    ~afniv
    "Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
  • At least one of the planes at the end of the circular terminal is a McDonnell Douglas DC9. The engines on a DC9 aren't longer than 2 or 3 meters, yet they seem to be between 4 and 6 pixels in length.

    It must be like DSL, where they gaurantee [sp] a certain minimum performance, and then routinely deliver in excess of it.

    Don Negro

  • A private company selling 1-meter res pix isn't ne (Score:3)

    by aheitner ( 3273 ) on Tuesday October 12, 1999 @09:25AM (#1620088)
    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!

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