Satellites Taking Pictures of Rockets Carrying More Satellites

https://www.planet.com/pulse/satellites-taking-pictures-of-rockets-carrying-more-satellites/

by privong • 9 years ago

214 46 9 years ago

planet.com

natch6• 9 years ago

Would love to see an actual speed version of this... what's the hurry?

liamk• 9 years ago

They stiched still images together to make the video, perhaps that created the speed up?

natch6• 9 years ago

Yes but that's configurable with a good tool.

jessriedel6• 9 years ago

I presume their satellites aren't equipped to take more than one image per second. (For most of their applications, it's not necessary, and adding that ability to a microsat is would definitely increase the weight/cost/power.)

You can watch it on 25% speed on YouTube. It's pretty jittery, so it would be nice if someone made an interpolated version.

pewpew_away• 9 years ago

I tried using butterflow and it seems ok at first, but I guess the algo is not made for this weird shot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a6QoKQNGWA&feature=youtu.be

This one might be better.

FPS is set to 60 and speed is the same:

https://youtu.be/b7Ua4mXO23E

wollstonecraft• 9 years ago

Their satellites have a one dimensional sensor that scans continuously.

ChuckMcM• 9 years ago

Think about the system[1], you've got to take a picture, store it, and then downlink it. If you take too many pictures your downlink is overloaded and you run out of memory. Assuming that an HD frame is about 2 megabytes once it is compressed, that is a 2 - 5 mbs downlink speed (depending on error correction). The satellites they launch are tiny and low power so they will have a limited budget for down link bandwidth.

That said, it makes me wonder about things like NROL76 which was a classified DoD payload that SpaceX launched and had no upper stage video from. At what point are there so many of these tiny satellites in orbit that they can pick up the fairing deploy and satellite separation independently? Or have them watch the X37 as it maneuvers around in orbit?

[1] https://www.planet.com/company/approach/

jessriedel6• 9 years ago

If bandwidth were the main limiting factor, they would just take video intermittently and downlink it over a long period of time. This would be useful for documenting real-time changes on the ground during important isolated events (e.g., rocket launches). But they apparently don't have this capability, and I think it's because the hardware for taking many frames per second just isn't worth the cost and complexity.

natch6• 9 years ago

Whoosh. Nobody is arguing that they don't have the frames that they have. As we can plainly see, they have plenty of frames from which to make a video that runs in closer to real time.

All they need to do is adjust the frame playback rate to make the video last longer. Yes it will have little jerky movements but it would give time for the viewer to enjoy and ponder what they are seeing.

fudged71• 9 years ago

There is a live HD zoomed video stream from the space station. Maybe someday they will catch one of these.

siscia• 9 years ago

Any of you have any idea of how much the images from planet.com cost?

notahacker2• 9 years ago

Satellite image prices through a broker, including Planet's RapidEye constellation

http://www.landinfo.com/satellite-imagery-pricing.html

Prices are per square kilometer, but there's a minimum order of 500 square kilometers, and you're paying for a licence for a certain number of people to use them in a certain way.

TLDR: best have at least a few hundred dollars handy even if you're only wanting to look at one city.

A lot of lower resolution satellite data is free and open though

Pica_soO• 9 years ago

Has somebody recombined low res data from many satellites to a high res free version? Sort of like many synced cheap oscilloscopes can form a expensive one?

jessriedel6• 9 years ago

Any idea why the minimum area requirements exist? It completely kills localized applications like a single farm. It seems like a minimum price, which you could also reach by committing to buy regular photos for a period of time, would be a lot more flexible.

dopeboy• 9 years ago

Kind of offtopic but I figured I'd ask: how close are we to enemy of the state style satellites that can track movement like a overhead CCTV camera?

danielharrison• 9 years ago

Beyond close. We've been touching for years.

Boothroid• 9 years ago

In 2001 I was in a lecture with a world authority on remote sensing, and he was unwilling to talk about the highest resolutions..

mseebach• 9 years ago

There are probably satellites capable of very high resolution pictures, but tracking a person with a continuous video feed is probably not practical - you'd need a ridiculous number of satellites due to the orbit.

What we do have, and have had for a couple of decades, is drones, and they can definitely do that.

Iv• 9 years ago

20 years ago they pretended it was good enough to differentiate between Saddam Hussein and his decoy lookalikes.

It is possible however that they made that up to not reveal an internal source of intel.

I, for one, think we have been there for a while. The tech is not hard: camera with huuuuge optics will bring you there.

The military have secret satellites with undisclosed specs, that's what they have been doing since Sputnik. You bet they are good at it by now.

kevin_thibedeau2• 9 years ago

The government never made those claims. The media has fanciful ideas of what our imagery capabilities are and it isn't in the government's interest to correct them.

jsmthrowaway• 9 years ago

The tech might not be hard, but stationkeeping an orbit on top of a target is, unless you have optics that can handle 36,000 kilometers of distance (geosynchronous). All other, lower, orbits involve the satellite hauling ass across the ground, usually at 5+ kilometers per second. The video would be great for about five seconds.

Real spy satellites have time windows and image like hell within the window, then adjust for the next orbit and wait 90 minutes. They’re often in polar orbit, too, because then you get different parts of Earth as it rotates under you. Satellite surveillance is quite tedious, and the enemy knows where and when they are.

anon5289602• 9 years ago

Huge optics is one option

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic-aperture_radar

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-215

Things in space can often be seen with a good from the ground.

wmf• 9 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCrB1t8MncY

oelmekki2• 9 years ago

Each time I'm sad we're not exploring galaxy star trek style yet and the space conquest made a flop, I remember how many commercial satellites are around here.

It really has this regular taste of things you think just died after being hyped (the moon landing) and which you suddenly realize has got slowly, steadily, discretely omnipresent since then without anybody noticing much (granted, satellites are not as cool as visiting other celestial bodies, but that's still growth, and going the right direction).

I would love to see a graph of the amount of satellites in activity over time.

DiThi• 9 years ago

You may be excited about SpaceX plans.

tenpies• 9 years ago

It has basically fallen into a classic hype cycle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

This is partly why I'm skeptical of technologies when the media is talking about them. It probably means we're somewhere on the peak of inflated expectations.

oelmekki2• 9 years ago

Indeed - Elliott waves come in mind too. As un-scientific as those ideas can be, not being expressed in any kind of mathematics, they seem to point at some possible reality in growth patterns. Notably, the fact that there's always a plunge after a first surge - where everybody think it's dead and where it starts a new uptrend - is something that makes me really curious.

Note that it's not just about people expectation either : humans actually went on the moon, they didn't just talk about it, and they didn't go any further in decades. So beside expectation, it doesn't seem far fetched to say there indeed was a plunge in achievements, at least if we consider distance traveled by humans (which should grow again when/if we go on Mars).

valuearb• 9 years ago

The peak of inflated expectations was the Saturn V. Custom built, massive, cost around $10,000/lb in present day dollars to low earth orbit.

The trough of disillusionment was the Shuttle. Much smaller payload capacity, trapped in LEO so it ended manned deep space exploration, and cost around $50,000/lb to LEO.

The Falcon Heavy is the highest capacity launch system since the Saturn V, and will cost $1,000/lb to LEO. I think the plateau of productivity approaches.

MR4D• 9 years ago

With this kind of video, it would be interesting to see how the North Korean rockets actually do.

Something tells me the CIA/NSA have already used this to get an answer. And at military resolution too.

the_d00d• 9 years ago

Vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires

Satellites Taking Pictures of Rockets Carrying More Satellites

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