Aardvark Daily

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Wow, that's impressive

13 October 2008

If you've used Google Earth, you'll have noticed that some areas of the world are presented in stunning detail - to the extent that you can make out individual people and even see what kind of plants are in someone's garden.

Other areas however (Tokoroa for example) appear to be composed of very large pixelated images where even state-highway one is hard to pick out from the blurry mess.

Why the difference?

Well those images that provide stunning resolution are almost certainly the result of aerial photography rather than satellite images, that's why.

Local councils have for many years, been using aircraft fitted with cameras to get sharp images of the areas over which they have authority.

Often, these images are used not just for documenting the district but also for picking up things like unpermitted buildings, swimming pools, etc., so that the enforcement people can go round and extract money with menaces.

Where possible, Google has obtained rights to these images but in many other cases we're stuck with satellite images, many of which are years out of date.

Well now Google has announced that it'll be using imagery from the latest satellite launched by GeoEye.

The Geoeye-1 satellite has just sent back its first image and boy, it's pretty damned impressive!

According to Geoeye's blurb, the Geoeye1 "is the world's highest resolution and most-accurate commercial Earth-imaging satellite and is able to collect imagery with a ground resolution of 0.41 meters (about 16 inches) in black and white mode and 1.64 meters in color"

It would appear as if the kind of sci-fi stuff we saw in the 1998 movie Enemy of the State is getting closer and closer to reality.

Speaking of Google Earth, I find it amazing how many people I meet who really think this stuff is "realtime".

They honestly believe that what they're seeing is almost "live" coverage from satellites that monitor the earth 24/7. They're often disappointed when I point out to them that some of the images may (in the case of Tokoroa for example) be a decade or more out of date.

However, the availability of satellites such as Geoeye-1, with resolutions that were previously reserved solely for military use, will hopefully allow Google to update its entire mosaic of the planet's surface.

Now we might think that realtime surveillance of *your* neigbourhood by satellite such that anyone, anywhere in the world can see what's happening outside your own house, right now, is just more sci-fi. But, if things keep going the way they are, it's very probable that at sometime in the not too distant future, it will become a reality.

Imagine being able to pull out your cellphone and get a bird's eye view of the Auckland motorway system so as to see how much traffic will slow your trip to/from work.

Sure, there are webcams that will give you some of that info -- but being able to zoom and pan a single image would just be so much more useful.

And, if you're planning a weekend away, how about a live image of what cloud-cover over the country and the Tasman looks right *now*?

Far-fetched?

Well London city alone has over 10,000 CCTV cameras installed within its precincts and that has cost them around NZ$600 million - plus ongoing maintenance. The Geoeye-1 satellite cost just NZ$833 million and is expected to last a good long while without too much attention.

What on earth did Arthur C. Clarke think he was doing when he came up with the concept of artificial satellites?

Are you a Google Earth fan?

Do you spend extraordinarily large amounts of time earth-surfing, looking for strange things that have been snapped by orbiting satellites or aircraft?

The most interesting/odd thing I've seen are some kind of mountain bunkers in the highlands of China that are accessible by what looks like a rugged road that would need 4WD to negotiate. Perhaps they're a defensive missile installation, I don't know - but I'm sure the US military has their coordinates stored in a special folder somewhere and they have *much* higher resolution images of the area.

Where to from here in terms of global surveillance?

What's your best "find" on Google Earth?

Are you impressed by the resolution of those Geoeye-1 images?

What happens when it's cloudy?

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