41–50 of 72 posts
I love living in a video game.
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You wouldn't use drug money for spy satellites, they're happily paid for by Congress. Drug money's for stuff you don't want tied back to the organization - assassinations, corruption, etc.
That's right. see: The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade by Alfred W. McCoy for more details.
I was for some reason completely unaware of this possibility. How much would comissioning such a clip cost, and whats the delay? I looked through the website but couldn't seem to find concrete info. I am surprised that the media isn't using this, like they have taken to using satellite imagery on news shows now. They could show moving imagery of troop movements on the Crimea right now? That seems like it would have a…
Specifically there is a lot of work in the mapping industry for taking a satellite image and turning it into a map. But there isn't nearly as much (if any) work about having a satellite, which can image the same spot repeatedly, providing a downlink of the the map rather than the image. By re-imaging you can just punt on features that are hard to guess and wait for the next pass to see if they will get easier. You might also be able to use multi-angle shadow analysis to pull some 3D feature extraction as well.
UrtheCast are working on something similar. Their camera recently made it to the ISS and the next step is a spacewalk to install it. http://www.urthecast.com
Robinson Meyer at “The Atlantic” did a nice overview two months ago: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/silico...
It’s an interesting time in remote sensing.
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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…
Bandwidth issues are alleviated by directional antennae, right?
They seem to be careful not to show a large object like a plane crossing the "seams" that appear in the video (similar to the seams in satellite imagery on maps where they've patched together data from multiple passes / satellites). When you see the cars on the freeway they seem to disappear at the seams. Does the camera have to be focused on an area the size of the blocks they show? This is still very impressive - I…
It seems like the part of the image showing the video is surrounded by pictures (not video). It seems everything is video because he is moving the image around just at the right time. A cool technology enanced with a cool trick.
I was for some reason completely unaware of this possibility. How much would comissioning such a clip cost, and whats the delay? I looked through the website but couldn't seem to find concrete info. I am surprised that the media isn't using this, like they have taken to using satellite imagery on news shows now. They could show moving imagery of troop movements on the Crimea right now? That seems like it would have a…
Everyone I know who's worked on microsatellite imaging has talked about the financial district. The thinking goes: watch the Panama or Suez Canal and you're the first one to know when an oil tanker gets delayed, etc..