Tuesday, October 29, 2013

High Resolution Satellite Imagery Give A Great Overview From Space

By Rachael Gutierrez


High resolution satellite imagery involves photos of earth taken from space. These images are of value to a growing collection of disciplines such as weather forecasting construction, agriculture, geology, town and country planning, military intelligence and field operations as well as bushfire fighting efforts.

These images have deepened the knowledge of various physical phenomena such as land formation, ocean currents, rogue waves, tsunamis and earthquakes. Both civilian and military organizations use images taken from space. Increasingly, artists also use the images for purely aesthetic purposes.

Images of the earth taken from space have quite a long history in which the USA figures prominently. A key first step was the photographs taken from space by an unmanned V-2 rocked launched by the USA in 1946. However, the V-2 rocket was not an orbiting platform; the images it captured are not therefore satellite images. The Explorer-6 satellite launched by the USA in 1959 took the first orbital photographs of planet earth.

Other major turning points in the history of space images include the Blue Marble photograph and start of the US Landsat Program in 1972 as well as the start of the US KH11 sat-system in 1977. The Blue Marble pic is hugely popular all over the world because it captures the haunting beauty of earth floating in space like a large blue marble. In its time, Lansat was the biggest effort to capture images of earth from space. KH11 produced the first real-time orbital images of earth.

Interpreting images taken from space is a specialist skill with the job title of imagery analyst. The task involves sophisticated software. Indeed, the US Navy Office of Naval Intelligence and the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency are big users of images taken from space and computer technology for its analysis.

If there is minimal cloud cover and a limited ocean area in the image, it will take an analyst only a limited amount of time, mere minutes, to physically scan and analyze the image and identify any target objects.

The practical reality is that cloud cover often complicates image analysis. Additionally, the task often involves covering huge areas of ocean. Light reflection and white caps on the sea surface are further complications that can greatly slow down analysis from minutes to many hours. Software speeds-up the analysis by scanning many thousands of lines of digital code underlying the images to find apparent anomalies that might represent target objects. The software can do in minutes what an analyst requires hours to do manually.

High resolution satellite imagery has been made the stuff of legend by Hollywood movies. They depict a world in which spy satellites take photos with enough clarity to identify an individual and read the happy birthday message on a cake. As it happens, these depictions are close to actual reality, provided the weather is clear.




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