Next time someone asks what you do, wouldn't you like to say, "rocket scientist," and mean it? If you're working on the GeoEye1 project, there's a chance you already can. GeoEye 1, which launches next month from Vandenburg AFB in California, is an imaging satellite. Its photos are significantly better than anything you've seen up til now.
GeoEye 1 is capable of 16 inch resolution, or .41 meters. That's a problem. The US government won't let you have anything resolved more finely than .5 meters! Images will have to be slightly degraded for commercial use. Don't worry, this is still a trade-up. It had better be, the satellite and its peripherals cost over $500,000,000!
Most people think satellite and think geosynchronous - a bird floating over the equator, like a TV or weather satellite. For high resolution observation you want a low Earth orbit, in this case a polar orbit. GeoEye 1 will cruise at 684 km or nearly 420 miles up. Relative to the ground below, GeoEye's camera will be moving quickly. In photography, that's the recipe for blur, yet these photos will be exceptionally crisp. Improved image stabilization techniques are key to increasing satellite resolution now and in the future.
There is a paper, in English, on blur reduction right here on the web. It's from Yang Pei Jun at Beijing Institute of Space Machine and Electricity, Beijing, China. Judging from the title, "A image-motion compensation system of high precision space camera," it wasn't originally written in English. To summarize - "This stuff's tough to do, dude, but we can do it."
The reason this matters to you is because of who GeoEye 1's clients are, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, among others. These better images will become your better images for mapping. Not too bad.
Real time tracking of people or vehicles through busy cities is still the stuff of books and movies. In the real world a polar orbiting satellite will usually see a place for seconds or minutes at a time and might not hit the same spot for three whole days. Today, this is about as good as it gets without government clearance.
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June 21, 2008 5:28 PM
::buffs nails:: I can claim that distinction! Being a rocket scientist, that is. ;) Although my aerospace engineer friends might disagree!
Anyway, 500 mil is chump change for a space mission that'll have this kind of reward, both commercially and publicly. And you bet that intelligence agencies will be the first ones to get their hands on those high-resolution images when they start to become available. Something tells me the NSA will horn in line in front of Google for dibs on the data from the satellite.
June 22, 2008 2:34 AM
Alan,
I'd like to know the orbital speed for the mission. The ability of the camera to compensate for this motion is what amazes me.
All the best,
Geoff Fox
June 23, 2008 1:01 AM
You're not kidding - think of the gyros that have to be on that camera in order to take photos that close up while simultaneously speeding through a polar orbit.
A did a little digging, and turned up an orbital velocity of About 7.5 km/sec or 45,000 mi/hr. Pretty speedy. ;)
http://www.satimagingcorp.com/satellite-sensors/geoeye-1.html