81–90 of 693 posts
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The bigger question of course is why the "agreement" was made with the Israelis, and not with the Palestinians directly.
USA is the only country on earth that recognises all of Israel’s territory claims.
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The short answer is no. High-resolution imagery comes from low-orbit satellites, which make a complete orbit about every two hours, and image long, narrow strips with each pass, taking days to image the whole planet. There are many of these satellites: commercial, non-military (publicly-accessible) governmental, and governmental (secret), of varying resolutions. These are also supplemented by aerial (plane) imagery.…
And even with such a budget: geostationary satellites over the poles are not possible[1] and really hard anywhere but over the equator, really. So that means most of the south and north part of the earth cannot be covered with such a constellation; they would need to be orbiting satellites, which makes "real time" even harder, because it would require an enormously complex choreography to ensure there's at least one…
It wouldn't be the most practical orbit for narrow FOV imagery but for polar weather, communications, and monitoring for things like over the pole missile launches they're pretty useful.
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Which the article indicates, at least as it relates to the US and her companies, is no longer the case: > In July 2020, the KBA was dropped, and now the US government allows American companies to provide far higher-quality images of the region (so that objects the size of a person can be readily picked out).
KBA wasn't dropped, it still applies. The law is still on the books. KBA gives the regulator (NOAA) the authority to set a resolution limit for images of Israel. They are supposed to set it to be the best resolution commercially available from non-US providers. In 1998, NOAA set it at 2 metres. In July 2020, NOAA dropped it to 0.4 metres. NOAA had been dragging their feet about that – in 2018, evidence was presented…
I zoomed into random areas like Chekka, Lebanon and Kumasi, Ghana. I hadn't heard of these places before today, but they looked big enough on Google Maps. Zooming in, the mosaics appeared as if they were shot years apart, with noticeably different resolutions. Could Gaza just be one such scan, rather than something sinister? > "Considering the importance of current events, I see no reason why commercial imagery of th…
The question isn't whether the data exists. It does. The question is, why isn't it being displayed?
Correction: Google now consumes data from Planet - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/googl...
Is it possible to have real-time live-feed of the entire planet? If cost isn't an issue, would something like that be possible?
https://zoom.earth/ not quite real time (I'm not sure if that's even possible) but this is quite up to date. I used to to check out the smoke from last year. edit: you get pictures every 10 minutes of the whole globe, but the resolution is pretty bad, good enough to check the cloud coverage though
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The US seems to manage OK forming relationships with Taiwan, for example.
Taiwan has a working government.
Is it possible to have real-time live-feed of the entire planet? If cost isn't an issue, would something like that be possible?
Is it possible to have real-time live-feed of the entire planet? If cost isn't an issue, would something like that be possible?
The short answer is no. High-resolution imagery comes from low-orbit satellites, which make a complete orbit about every two hours, and image long, narrow strips with each pass, taking days to image the whole planet. There are many of these satellites: commercial, non-military (publicly-accessible) governmental, and governmental (secret), of varying resolutions. These are also supplemented by aerial (plane) imagery.…
Just wanting to learn more about this.
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And the US is emperor of pointing satellites at the Middle East? There aren’t other satellites outside US/Israel jurisdiction that can fill it in? Or they’re not allowed to pass it on?
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27187416 Google being a "US Company" they are following that law.
KBA applies to operators of imaging satellites, Google's suppliers such as Maxar. In practice, it doesn't apply to distributors, only acquirers. (The text of KBA talks about issuing licenses for "dissemination" of satellite images, but you don't need a license to resell satellite images, or buy them then give them away for free like Google does.)
Legally, there is nothing stopping Google from using a non-US imagery supplier to get higher resolution images of Israel into Google Maps.
In practice, they probably don't want to. It is walking into a political minefield, and Google doesn't really gain anything for themselves by walking into that minefield.