Scary--1 meter resolution satellite images anywhere in NA for free

This is cool and scary at the same time:

Go to google and type in satellite images. Look for the results from microsoft terra-server or something. Go to that page and you can get 1 or 2 (Can't remember which) meter resolution black and white images of anywhere in North America for free. This is scary. Think of what certain people could do with this info. The images aren't really current, but they are there. I found my grandparent's boat club on the cheasapeake on there and my house.

There are other sites that have color and .3 meter resolution but these you have to pay for. But still if this stuff is public think of what the military has under wraps. scary. Maybe centimeter resolution?

A much better program as far as I say, was originally a military recon sat. It does eat up alot up system resources however, but it is of the better quality sat programs. As for really high res, only a professional service is going to get that. What is commercially available is civilianized, for lack of better words.

I stumble across a website about a year ago and i remember it advertising "Infra-red" sat images of anywhere in the UK with a 1 meter res for a certain price and what i remember of it is that the price was actually not that expensive.

Maybe it was just a false site though.

I thought Terra Servers images were no better than 5 meter resolution. In the GIS field, we use DOQQs (digital orthophoto quarter quadrangles) to overlay things like roads and parcels. KY has been a leader in this and we are starting to see new quads flown to 1 meter resolution but we are a wee bit from having the whole state. Usually, it involves contracting a company lto fly the required quads. One of my county's 911 coordiantors was telling me the Corp of Engineers footed the bill for a coverage involving a flood plain study. Most are still in JPEG and haven't been ticked with vector data for GIS apps yet but its underway.

In 2000 I had 80 acres of land in Colorado in the path of a serious forest fire. I was stuck in Denver and was a ble to go to a website and actually get realtime sat images of the fire, 40 miles away in the Mountains. I was able to locate my land and even see that the 30' Yurt on it was still there, even though everything around it got flashed.

Yeah, this technology can be scary but I thought I would give an example of a beneficial use of it.

does any body have a link. it sounds pretty cool.

NASA World Wind has the US Geological Survey 1 meter resolution image (what is mentioned above as at terraserver.microsoft.com) as well as some other interesting stuff. It is free.

The Keyhole Viewer is free for a brief period but has 1 meter color images of large urban areas and lesser in rural areas. The entire world is also viewable in this viewer.

Both of which have been posted about before, btw.

I'd be worried, but this is all public information. Anyone with access to an airplane can see all of that, or walk around in the actual areas.

How is this determined as 1 meter resolution? The closest you can get to a spot on the medium map size is about a 350 meter square. As for them being current, ummm March of 2000 is not current or even close to current by my ideas.

I hope this dont come back to bite me but it is true.during desert storm I was up in the communications room of my ship and seen a focus test picture of a quarter lying in the sand taken by sattelite.it was in pefect focus in real size on a 4x6 photo.I was not supposed to see this it just happened to be on the commanders desk and I was delivering a piece of equiptment to a friend who worked in there.I did not have clearance to even be in the room.

I remember in the 80's they were talking about satellites with such a high resolution cameras/lens they could read a newspaper.

I believe the resolution refers to per pixel resolution, so 1 pixel represents 1 meter. Most of them are probably capable of capturing better resolution but it would require many more photos to be taken.

I found a military base in my old town. it's surrounded by woods and you'd never knew it was there unless you looked. (and the place is about as big as a small town itself).

I used terraserver to build a mosaic from the satelite images from 1995 and 1998, showing the route from my old house to the military base. it came out great.

This hit me last night but if they can get a pic of a quarter for desert storm why is it so hard for them to find OBL? There is no doubt in my mind that the capability is there to get a good, hi res pic of someone's face from space so why is it so hard to find the guy? Not mention, in the words of Robin Williams, "Look for the 6-foot arab attatched to his luggage." He's on a dyalysis machine, come on now.

This technology should make it easy to find terrorists like this, at least in my mind. Now I know that there are probably all sorts of technical limitations and people will jump all over this view as naive but it was just a thought that the job should be easier with hi res satellites.

Whoever said the example with the forest fire i never thought of it that way. Pretty cool.

Some of you guys jumped in with all these specifications. I'm not a satellite specialist so I don't know anything really about the hardware. I simply found it interesting that such hi res images would be available for free.

2000 or 1994 in my mind is pretty current to be publicly available, especially since, (correct me if I'm wrong) the images for the Terraserver were taken using the old russian satellites.

Jeez! I tried it out and it had my hometown right down to every detail!! The best resolution was like 0.159 meters or something! That's insane! I just don't know what the hell the govornment is up to now, and why don't they have that in Iraq, Kuwait, or Afghanistan if they think they are so high and mighty!

Originally posted by NothingMakesSense
This hit me last night but if they can get a pic of a quarter for desert storm why is it so hard for them to find OBL? There is no doubt in my mind that the capability is there to get a good, hi res pic of someone's face from space so why is it so hard to find the guy? Not mention, in the words of Robin Williams, "Look for the 6-foot arab attatched to his luggage." He's on a dyalysis machine, come on now.

If you know where to point the camera then you already know where he is. The truth is, it's no easier to find someone via satellite than it is by aerial reconnaissance.

I actually do GIS for the Army. The thing you must first look at with all Civilian platforms is that the government has shutter control. Meaning that even though many corporations, ie: Space Imaging with their IKONOS bird is still controlled on who they can sell images to. The U.S. governement can even shut down the optics given certain situations.

I'm not going to get into resolutions due to the fact of Security issues, but on the unclassified side of the house, civil engineering commonly gets 6 inch resolution.

USGS Seamless Data

This is just one site that has some data that you can look around at.

Enjoy.

I don't understand why you guys are so shocked. You knew about Hubble and this is the same thing turned in the opposite direction.

So far as resolutions go, I wouldn't be surprised if it could get into the microscopic range. Up in space there is very little to shake the satellite off course.