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It is worth noting, at this point, that the cost of satellites is not a cheap date: Envisat

alone cost 2.3 Billion euros to launch and maintain. That said, in its lifetime, Envisats
data has yielded numerous scientific discoveries, including atmospheric chemistry,
biological oceanography and digital modelling of the earths elevation, delivering over a
petabyte of data in its lifetime.
Somewhat surprisingly, in recent years, commercial vendors of satellite imaging systems
have become available, allowing any country of individual to have access to satellite
imaging for the right price. The SPOT (an acronym from the French translation of
Satellite for Observation of Earth) satellite series is a series of commercially available
imaging satellites. The first in the series was launched in the 1980s, and since then a
total of seven SPOT satellites have been put into orbit. The resolution of the most recent,
SPOT 7, is a stunning 1.5 meters in the visual band, and a single image taken records a
60km x 60km area. Its humbling to know that this satellite can therefore image 3
million square kilometres a day, potentially giving daily updates to a customer, be they
images of troop movements or weather patterns.
Given SPOTs potential, public live satellite feeds are inevitable. The company AstroVision
was developing real-time streaming of satellite imaging when they when they went
bankrupt due to lack of customer interest. Fortunately, there is somewhat of an
alternative; NASA has mounted several commercial HD video cameras on the outside of
the International Space Station, and they currently broadcast a live image of the earth at
all times. It may not be worthy of gathering scientific data, but it has captured the
imagination of many watching the earth from the safety of their own home.
Discussing the resolution of a satellites imaging system really breaks down into four
areas; spatial, spectral, temporal and radiometric. Spatial resolution is defined as the
area covered by one pixel on the surface of the earth. This is determined by the height
at which the satellite is orbiting at, and of course the pixel density of the cameras
imaging system itself. The full spatial resolution, although often very good in many
satellites (as weve seen in several examples, often in the order of meters), is actually
rarely used, unless a specific object is trying to be observed. Osama Bin Ladens
compound, for example, was heavily imaged by US surveillance satellites before the
SEALs raid in 2011. More often however, larger features are of more interest, such as
weather patterns or elevation, leading to a lot of the raw data remaining unprocessed.
Spatial resolution and Geometric resolution are often used interchangeably, although
the latter technically refers to the two dimensional pixel size (for example, a geometric
resolution of 0.5 metres refers to a pixel size of a 0.5 x 0.5 metre area).
Spectral Resolution is the accuracy at which the satellites camera can resolve different
sections of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the smallest change in wavelength that a
satellite can measure. This resolution is of course different depending on the objective of
the camera; a satellite sensitive to the infrared area of the spectrum would need to cover
a larger spectral range than a satellite just sensitive to the visual, for example. Temporal
Resolution determines the amount of time that passes between images being taken; this
is as much affected by the speed of the satellites as well as hardware factors. To
somebody developing live satellite images, this could be one of the most difficult factors
to overcome, as rapidly capturing high resolution images and transmitting them could
potentially be challenging. Radiometric resolution describes the number of levels of
brightness that the camera can record; 256 in the case of 8-bit image processing,
although higher levels are also used.

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