Wonder if this can be used over Ukraine/Crimea?
I am pretty certain that's exactly what CIA is doing right now, but using their own spy satellite constellation.
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Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
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Re: Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
#12There are some hard, unforgiving physical limits on resolution of photographs from orbit, even with digital correction of the images. For one thing, the camera is necessarily far away, and moving fast at the same time.[1] I was able to follow the specific link just kindly submitted here, which of course shows a rather large object (a commercial airliner). The satellite company's image gallery[2] compares quite favora…
We've been overcoming hard, unforgiving physical limits for ages.
The obvious solution in this case is to combine images from multiple satellites, ala http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope
Re: Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
#13You should be able to see Sean Miller on that northern Africa encampment pretty easily now.
Re: Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
#14Site is down for me. Any mirrors?
The video from the page is this:
https://player.vimeo.com/video/88122560
and says its from Skybox’s SkySat-1.
Re: Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
#15There are some hard, unforgiving physical limits on resolution of photographs from orbit, even with digital correction of the images. For one thing, the camera is necessarily far away, and moving fast at the same time.[1] I was able to follow the specific link just kindly submitted here, which of course shows a rather large object (a commercial airliner). The satellite company's image gallery[2] compares quite favora…
The first link you provided also brings up several interesting implications about continuous surveillance from space. The first is that it is technically possible, but economically difficult. Getting ~5000 high resolution satellites in LEO is not really all that much more difficult than getting 1, it's a matter of scale. But getting funding to put that number up is virtually impossible. Even smallsats and other swarm approaches lack the physical space for the sensors (which is limited by physics, not technology). This is why air breathing drones are becoming so important. Make no mistake, NASA continuous aircraft programs like Helios have ready applications in surveillance. And from those heights, the sensors don't have to be nearly as large as on an LEO bird.
The second is that receiving data from that many birds is problematic. There are only so many receiving stations and only so much EM bandwidth available for communication and recovery of the images. Even switching to drones doesn't solve the problem. Even as of last year bandwidth was a limiting factor for the number of drones up in the air at once. [1] So now we have two problems, getting birds in the air, and we still have the bandwidth problem for downlink.
Finally, analyzing that much imagery is nearly impossible. Automated algorithms help some with certain tasks, but storage, processing, accessing, then analyzing all of that on a continuous basis is pretty much impossible. So even if getting enough sensors deployed is solved, and getting bandwidth is solved, it doesn't mean there's enough people to physically look at and interpret the results anyway. And storing all that for later instantaneous on-demand retrieval is still a problem nobody's really solved.
1 - http://www.defensenews.com/article/20130331/DEFFEAT02/303310...
Re: Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
#16There are some hard, unforgiving physical limits on resolution of photographs from orbit, even with digital correction of the images. For one thing, the camera is necessarily far away, and moving fast at the same time.[1] I was able to follow the specific link just kindly submitted here, which of course shows a rather large object (a commercial airliner). The satellite company's image gallery[2] compares quite favora…
[deleted]
Re: Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
#17There are some hard, unforgiving physical limits on resolution of photographs from orbit, even with digital correction of the images. For one thing, the camera is necessarily far away, and moving fast at the same time.[1] I was able to follow the specific link just kindly submitted here, which of course shows a rather large object (a commercial airliner). The satellite company's image gallery[2] compares quite favora…
We've been overcoming hard, unforgiving physical limits for ages. The obvious solution in this case is to combine images from multiple satellites, ala http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope
Yes. It would be unwise to assume that space-based optical interferometry is not currently being done.
Re: Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
#18Re: Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
#19I am more amazed at the lack of smog blocking visibility.
Disclaimer: I'm Chinese and I love Beijing as a city, on a good day it's about as clean as LA and on a bad day its...well you can barely see airport terminal when you land.