These high detail satellite images are really impressive.
As there are several (startup) companies in this field I just looked up who is still around/got bought and what's there status:
GeoEye was merged into DigitalGlobe. Google had secured exclusive online mapping use of the GeoEye-1 satellite (Google Maps/Earth). Google bought the direct competitor Skybox for US$500 million in August 1, 2014. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigitalGlobe , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoEye , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skybox_Imaging ). There is also "Spot Image" (EADS/Airbus), NASA (and other US agencies), Sovinformsputnik (the Russian Federal Space Agency) and others.
I knew I recognized the name "Planet Labs"; they're the company whose CubeSats (or at least some of them) were accidentally launched [0]. I wonder how the accidental launches impacted their timeline (e.g. were they able to retrieve the CubeSats and re-launch).
Hi, I work for Planet Labs. There was definitely no retrieving those Doves once they were deployed, even had we wanted to. The good news is that we've put a lot of effort into automating our systems, so those satellites actually pinged us shortly after their deploy and were all ready for commissioning! They're currently a few hundred kilometres up and taking photos for us.
Always fun to count containers to estimate economic activity. Or cranes/building changes. Would be a fun student project which would take a picture of the Port of Los Angeles or the Port of Oakland and return a number of estimated containers. Then run that over a year with once a week sampling across random days of the week.
They do use aerial photos for the really zoomed-in bits, yeah. I don't think anything but the best military satellites could provide the kind of resolution you often see on Google Maps. Maybe not even then...
25 years ago, the KH-12 series of spy satellites reputedly had a resolution of around 2cm[1]. FAS also has a page that shows what different resolutions do with a newspaper headline[2]. 1 cm resolution can nearly read newspaper headlines from space (squint your eyes when you look at the 1 cm picture, and note that software can reconstruct that picture you see better than that method does).
Eh? The K-11/12 uses the same chassis as the Hubble.
Both of them have a 2.4M mirror, which means that under best conditions (minimal orbit) and no atmospheric distortion (which never happens) they'll have a max resolution of 16 or so centimeters (that's just basic optics for you), so not sure where did FAS got the 2cm number from. But i can tell you from 1st hand experience that even for military applications sub 50cm resolution is considered state of the art today.
US Spy satellites used to be always multi sensor platforms, the KH11/12 series was no different, and until the most recent ones they all had both digital and analog (film) components. 25 years ago the KH series digital sensor had a resolution of 400^2 pixel, maybe maybe in the mid 90's they managed to get a bird with 800^2 sensor.
The resolution is also dependent on the spectrum you use, SWIR is the most common in use for military satellites as it gives the user a larger operational envelope in being able to take imagery in low light conditions as well as penetrating light cloud cover and some non-adverse weather conditions.
However SWIR is just as much as affected by atmospheric distortions as visible light is, which means you tend to lose anywhere between 50% and 300% of your maximum resolution due to diffusion and refraction of the light within the atmosphere. (common back of the hand calculation is 2.5 times the maximum resolution of your optical system at MTF 50, which accidentally for the KH 2.4m mirror birds gives a resolution of about 40cm which slightly better than the best images released to the public from those platforms which was around the 50cm mark)
Thermal imaging tends to allow the sensor to capture much higher resolution image e.g. identifying individual people against a background (which is maybe where the 2cm resolution nonsense comes form) but those images are not graphically interpretable, they literally appear as white dots on a dark background.
SAR imagery probably gives the best resolution these days since it's virtually not effected by any atmospheric conditions and there are tons of ways to cheat with it to give you even sub centimeter resolution it just will take weeks if not months to take that image. SAR however will not allow you to read a headline or a license plate since it uses RADAR interpolation to construct a visible image.
Visible spectrum sensors are pretty much not used in military applications outside of modern aerial photography, and even then they'll always will have a SWIR or SAR fallback sensor. Simply because in a military application "color" isn't as important as being able to take pictures in low light to pitch dark and in all weather conditions.
That said the development life cycle for military equipment is much much longer than it's civilian counterparts, and in fact many earth observing civilian satellites tended to have better resolution than many if not all of their military (at least non-US ones) counterparts, many countries actually buy their satellite images from civilian companies EROS A and B (ImageSat) have about 80% foreign government utilization mostly European and APAC countries that lack the ability to launch their own birds, or have lacking coverage in general. So it would not surprise me if this bird has better capabilities than most current military sat's out there, they don't need to jump trough a billion hoops and standards, worry about compatibility with legacy and future platforms, or worry about congress cutting funding in the next mid term elections.
But damn 30cm per pixel in true color, thats better not only than most satellites out there, but than most high altitude atmospheric platforms as well.
Especially considering that no one besides the US has the capability to launch big birds these days, and even the US lost their ability to refuel them so not many 20,000 KG EOS's are going up there.
I'm really wondering what optics they use since I don't think they use a mirror which comes even close to the 2.4M the NRO was able to use. They must to have build a pretty insane adaptive optics setup to get that resolution going.
Their old pricing was something like $30/km2 with a minimum of 25km for Quickbird and their Standard resolutions.. so I believe the minimum order was ~$750. Not sure if that applies to their 30cm product too.
I had some success with EarthExplorer, finding a high-res 15cm orthoimagery survey for a waterway that our area of interest happened to be next to. A few GB of .tiff data later and we had terrific resolution satellite photos of our entire site.
You might want to check with one of the random aerial photo outfits nearby too, you can get usually find a random guy with a plane and a DSLR for ~$1k, and I'm sure he'd give a big discount if you committed to monthly pics.
Alternatively, from a random Google search, I found these guys (http://interiair.com/faqs/) who take drone pics near Reno. I'd imagine you could get a pretty good deal, although it would take more managing than a satellite option.
Sorry - just checking my understanding. You want to buy satellite images of the tesla factory to work out how long it will take them to get to your number in the purchase list?
That is my favourite Ice Station Zebra moment to date!
If you really need to get a hold of someone my roommate works there. Since the google acquisition, I'm not sure they operate the same as they used to so a small contract might not be what they're looking for.
What are the limits of resolution based solely on the lens size that a satellite can carry?
And are they able to get higher resolution using some other tricks?
And are there limits on the size of civilian satellite payloads vs military payloads? Is there a theoretical limit to resolution that spy satellites have based on lens size?
"This means that it would be impossible to take photographs showing objects smaller than 16 cm with such a telescope at such an altitude. Modern U.S. IMINT satellites are believed to have around 10 cm resolution; contrary to references in popular culture, this is sufficient to detect any type of vehicle, but not to read the headlines of a newspaper."
There is also going to be some sort of limit based upon the atmospheric correction that needs to take place to get that sort of accuracy. Light is going to travel (bend) differently through different atmospheric conditions like temperature, pressure, and even composition of the atmosphere in that area. There is also reflectance issues based on the surfaces that are reflecting the light. Clouds and snow are extremely reflective and will need to be corrected for as well in order to not miss out on other parts of the image.
I think this may be less of an issue now than in the past with all of the cloud computing capabilities out there, but they still to develop the techniques.
As there are several (startup) companies in this field I just looked up who is still around/got bought and what's there status:
GeoEye was merged into DigitalGlobe. Google had secured exclusive online mapping use of the GeoEye-1 satellite (Google Maps/Earth). Google bought the direct competitor Skybox for US$500 million in August 1, 2014. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigitalGlobe , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoEye , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skybox_Imaging ). There is also "Spot Image" (EADS/Airbus), NASA (and other US agencies), Sovinformsputnik (the Russian Federal Space Agency) and others.