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Satellites Taking Pictures of Rockets Carrying More Satellites

planet.com

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Re: Satellites Taking Pictures of Rockets Carrying More Satellites

#11
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about the system[1], you've got to take a picture, store it, and then downlink it. If you take too many pictures your downlink is overloaded and you run out of memory. Assuming that an HD frame is about 2 megabytes once it is compressed, that is a 2 - 5 mbs downlink speed (depending on error correction). The satellites they launch are tiny and low power so they will have a limited budget for down link bandwidth…

If bandwidth were the main limiting factor, they would just take video intermittently and downlink it over a long period of time. This would be useful for documenting real-time changes on the ground during important isolated events (e.g., rocket launches). But they apparently don't have this capability, and I think it's because the hardware for taking many frames per second just isn't worth the cost and complexity.

As mentioned in parent, the rate you can capture depends on the resolution (i.e. image size in bytes), downlink speed, available memory, and length of the event.

As the length of the event approaches infinity, the framerate you can capture is basically bandwidth / image size. `(mb/s)/mb = 1/s` (aka hz). Beyond that limit, the memory size / image size gives you a hard limit for the number of additional frames you can buffer. To get a constant frame rate, you want to spread that quantity over the duration of the event.

Re: Satellites Taking Pictures of Rockets Carrying More Satellites

#12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If bandwidth were the main limiting factor, they would just take video intermittently and downlink it over a long period of time. This would be useful for documenting real-time changes on the ground during important isolated events (e.g., rocket launches). But they apparently don't have this capability, and I think it's because the hardware for taking many frames per second just isn't worth the cost and complexity.

As mentioned in parent, the rate you can capture depends on the resolution (i.e. image size in bytes), downlink speed, available memory, and length of the event. As the length of the event approaches infinity, the framerate you can capture is basically bandwidth / image size. `(mb/s)/mb = 1/s` (aka hz). Beyond that limit, the memory size / image size gives you a hard limit for the number of additional frames you can…

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Re: Satellites Taking Pictures of Rockets Carrying More Satellites

#16
post #14

Any of you have any idea of how much the images from planet.com cost?

Satellite image prices through a broker, including Planet's RapidEye constellation

http://www.landinfo.com/satellite-imagery-pricing.html

Prices are per square kilometer, but there's a minimum order of 500 square kilometers, and you're paying for a licence for a certain number of people to use them in a certain way.

TLDR: best have at least a few hundred dollars handy even if you're only wanting to look at one city.

A lot of lower resolution satellite data is free and open though

Re: Satellites Taking Pictures of Rockets Carrying More Satellites

#18
post #15

Kind of offtopic but I figured I'd ask: how close are we to enemy of the state style satellites that can track movement like a overhead CCTV camera?

In 2001 I was in a lecture with a world authority on remote sensing, and he was unwilling to talk about the highest resolutions..

Re: Satellites Taking Pictures of Rockets Carrying More Satellites

#19
Each time I'm sad we're not exploring galaxy star trek style yet and the space conquest made a flop, I remember how many commercial satellites are around here.

It really has this regular taste of things you think just died after being hyped (the moon landing) and which you suddenly realize has got slowly, steadily, discretely omnipresent since then without anybody noticing much (granted, satellites are not as cool as visiting other celestial bodies, but that's still growth, and going the right direction).

I would love to see a graph of the amount of satellites in activity over time.

Re: Satellites Taking Pictures of Rockets Carrying More Satellites

#20
post #14

Any of you have any idea of how much the images from planet.com cost?

Satellite image prices through a broker, including Planet's RapidEye constellation http://www.landinfo.com/satellite-imagery-pricing.html Prices are per square kilometer, but there's a minimum order of 500 square kilometers, and you're paying for a licence for a certain number of people to use them in a certain way. TLDR: best have at least a few hundred dollars handy even if you're only wanting to look at one city.…

Has somebody recombined low res data from many satellites to a high res free version? Sort of like many synced cheap oscilloscopes can form a expensive one?
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