28 August 2015

It's not the Spanish Armanda...


Can you guess what the unusual formations are in this nanosatellite photo? (The area being imaged is the Myeongnyang Strait - if that helps...)

Which brings us to the subject of "nanosatellites" -
On Nov. 26, 2013, Planet Labs, a private start-up company of San Francisco, CA, announced that it successfully launched its most recent nanosatellites, Dove 3 and Dove 4, into orbit on a Dnepr vehicle (launch on Nov. 21, 2013 from the Yasny Cosmodrome, Russia), completing a series of four prototype nanosatellites in 2013. Those proved successful, enabling the company to quickly follow up with the production of a 28-member network. The launch of Planet Labs' "Flock 1" fleet of 28 nanosatellites in December/January, which will be the largest constellation of Earth-imaging satellites ever launched...

Their "Dove" nanosatellites are meant to be low-cost and rapidly deployable, and capable of taking pictures of Earth that provide a spatial resolution of 3-5 m. — On March 17, 2014, Planet Labs announced that it has confirmed launches for more than 100 satellites over the next 12 months. This full constellation of nanosatellites will allow Planet Labs to image the entire Earth every day. 
It's hard for me to wrap my mind around the concept that technology and data processing have progressed to the point that it is now possible to image the entire planet Earth every day at a resolution of a couple meters.

The answer to the initial question, btw, is at the link.

7 comments:

  1. AnonymousAugust 28, 2015 at 10:48 AM

    Is the link missing or am I growing dense?

    (Although it might be both!)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. MinnesotastanAugust 28, 2015 at 12:57 PM

      My bad. I was going to use the link as a highlight, but wound up using boldface instead. Inserted now, with a hat tip to Shrike for the interim fix.

      Delete
  2. ShrikeAugust 28, 2015 at 11:09 AM

    Let's try that again, with better formatting.

    Found the link in the source code. An a href tag is missing content.

    https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missions/f/flock-1#foot3%29

    ReplyDelete
  3. Mel V.August 28, 2015 at 11:49 AM

    I knew it had to be farming, I was guessing oysters. (Not correct, though.)

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousAugust 28, 2015 at 11:52 AM

    here is the same place from bing maps http://binged.it/1EpsZVu

    I-)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Adrian MorganAugust 28, 2015 at 7:44 PM

    It looks very much like a semi-transparent layer of out-of-focus writing (possibly Chinese characters) has been added to the image.

    But that's not it.

    ReplyDelete