However, DigitalGlobe can only sell these highest-resolution images to customers in the US government. For everyone else, the company is only licenced to release images with a resolution of 50cm 20 inches. The latest US spy satellites, in comparison, are reported to be able to pick out objects less than 10cm 4 inches across.
But, for obvious reasons, the US military does not make those images available for free on Google. Still, from more than km away, travelling at around eight kilometres per second, capturing an image half-a-metre across is an impressive technical achievement, and is less likely to raise concerns about privacy.
Images from WorldView-3 will be sold to thousands of businesses for everything from urban planning to forest monitoring, oil exploration to map making. But most of us will probably use them to look at our house from space. Unfortunately, unless you live in a major city, then you are unlikely to benefit in the short term from the improved images captured by this new satellite.
Google is also only likely to purchase images captured on a cloud-free day. For some of us, this makes the odds of getting a new space picture of our house increasingly thin. In fact there is a good chance that, within the next year, if you look at a satellite picture of a major city it will include images captured by WorldView But with their powers combined, they can track much more of the Earth than massive satellites from military-industrial juggernauts like DigitalGlobe.
Even more, Planet just this month purchased another mini-sat company, Terra Bella, from Google, to amp up its space surveillance. And that means it can sell more datadata perhaps about where you live or work or playfor more money. What kind of data, you ask? Images of farmland, for one, which can help customers measure crop yield. And if a tsunami inundates a coastline, satellite data can direct relief efforts to the right places. Retailers can take stock of parking lots to understand shopping schedules.
A mining company can learn how much material is coming out of their remote siteor their competitors'. And governments can spy on whatever governments spy on. And with the 88 sats launching today and Terra Bella's seven more, Planet is poised to become the most powerful provider of daily Earth imagery.
The sale and acquisition caps off half a decade of growth and turmoil in the sector. When I first wrote about the small-satellite industry three years ago , it seemed a rare locus of hardware innovation in a software- and services-obsessed technology industry. Earth-observing satellites require, at minimum, high-quality image sensors and reliable radio antennas.
The smartphone boom had transformed both: Thanks to economies of scale and foreign electronics manufacturing, the bare technological components of a satellite had become both cheap and nearly industrial-grade.
Taken together, this allowed companies to build much cheaper satellites. Unlike legacy players in the business, which build a single satellite worth tens of millions of dollars over the course of years, a startup could build lots of small satellites fast and hurl them into orbit. The two frontrunners in the industry were firms called Skybox Imaging and Planet Labs.
Skybox planned to build a small fleet of medium-sized satellites that could capture high-definition video of Earth. Planet Labs, on the other hand, wanted to flood the lowest reaches of orbit with shoebox-sized cubesats. You might be able to figure out where this is going. It relocated the company closer to its campus, then rechristened it Terra Bella in March It kept sending rounds of new Cubesats into the sky. Planet and Terra Bella—the two firms that, under different names, defined the industry three years ago—are now one organization.
Planet is now the obvious front runner, and the sector is its to define. Not that the game is over. Its newest WorldView satellites have nine-times the resolution of the best Terra Bella craft. They are also the size of small trucks. Last year, the company signed a deal with the technology accelerator for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to build a private constellation of Earth-observing small satellites.
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