The video below was taken by a satellite, from space. It has enough resolution to watch individual cars move down the road and identify sp...
The video below was taken by a
satellite, from space. It has enough resolution to watch individual cars move
down the road and identify specific planes at the Beijing airport.
The
footage is from Skybox Imaging, a
company that has just started offering customers 90-second video of any point on Earth from its SkySat-1 satellite, upping
the ability to monitor what’s going on down here on Earth from space. In
this clip, the SkyBox video sits on top of a static layer of satellite imagery
and is overlain by a map layer from Mapbox, based on OpenStreetMap. The
combination makes it super easy to see precisely where the planes and cars
are headed. Based on the exact time the video was taken, a plane that has just landed could be
identified using public flight
logs.
“What’s exciting now is being able to put the video directly on
a map,” said Mapbox CEO Eric Gunderson. “They’re an awesome data source, and we
have an awesome API that can digest that data.”
It’s easy to imagine all sorts of uses for satellite video like
monitoring container ships or spotting active illegal deforestation (more ideas
in the video below). The movement video gives you could also improve the map
layer by revealing which direction cars are traveling.
SkySat-1,
which the company claims is the smallest satellite capable of sub-meter
resolution imagery, is just the first of a fleet of 24 tiny satellites
Skybox has planned. The satellite sent back the first HD video from space in December, and the company has just
started to offer video to customers.
Another
company, Planet Labs, has just
finished launching its own fleet of 28 imaging microsatellites from the
International Space Station and hopes to offer scientists and the public the
chance to track changes on the Earth’s surface with much higher frequency than
ever before.
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