But those pictures tend to be several years old, because there are only so many commercial satellites and they can only cover so much ground.Īs with any surveillance technology, the proliferation of commercial imagery can be put to ill use, by both governments and the private sector. Planet LabsĬommercial imaging satellites are not new Americans have been looking at pictures from space of their houses on Google maps for years. Will Marshall and the founding members of Planet Labs in their garage office in 2012. Planet won't say how much each one costs to make, except that it's "orders of magnitude" cheaper than traditional satellites. Then they began blasting dozens of them into space at a time, piggybacking on commercial launches of larger satellites. Marshall and his partners built their first satellite in a garage, applying the principles of the smart phone, stuffing a sophisticated camera and telescope into a rectangular box that weighs as much as a bowling ball.
These days the most sophisticated government photo satellites can be the size of a school bus, and cost billions. The first spy satellites weighed nearly a ton and sent back pictures by dropping giant film canisters into passing airplanes. But it also will help us to transition away from this post-truth world, towards one more grounded in facts." "I think it's so important that the pictures don't lie," said Will Marshall, one of Planet's co-founders and a former NASA spacecraft designer. A satellite image captured by Planet Labs shows a white plume of smoke from an illegal North Korean missile test on May 4, 2019. In May, one of Planet's satellites captured a white plume of smoke from an illegal North Korean missile test, an image that rocketed through the next day's news cycle, undercutting President Donald Trump's insistence that the North Korean regime is negotiating with the U.S. The company is part of a fast-growing commercial satellite industry that is democratizing insights once available mainly to people with Top Secret government security clearances. They were taken by private spacecraft - some the size of a loaf of bread - operated by Planet Labs, a Silicon Valley company that is leading a revolution in how humans glimpse Earth from space.Ī short stroll from the downtown San Francisco headquarters of Yelp and LinkedIn, Planet operates the largest and least expensive fleet of satellites in history - the first to take pictures of the entire landmass of the globe, once a day, and sell them to the public.
0 kommentar(er)
