Even if the airplanes didn't manage to catch the film in the falling bucket, I would imagine that the buckets were water proof, so the film could still be recovered. It seems that they wanted to catch it with the airplanes just to ensure that no one else got to the bucket before they did.
+Physics Videos by Eugene Khutoryansky The opposite, actually. If the canister was dropped into the ocean, they wanted to ensure that the enemy couldn't ever recover it and discover the exact capabilities of the spy satellite. They used solid salt plugs that would dissolve in water and cause the capsule to sink to the bottom of the ocean if the recovery failed.
+Physics Videos by Eugene Khutoryansky The buckets had a salt plug that would dissolve if left in water for more than a day. So if they missed, the film was usually lost.
No, the buckets were designed to sink fast. The Russians knew where we caught them and we could not risk the Russians finding out where we were looking.
The biggest limitation of satellite imagery these days is Diffraction Limits. Due to the way light moves through the atmosphere, it's practically impossible to get better than about 10-15cm resolution without being in a very low orbit or having ludicrously sized imaging apertures.
+Jon Dyson then your spy satellite would quite bad at being stealthy, since high wattage lasers would be easily detected by the enemy. And, when astronomers use lasers its to create an apparent "fake" star with very well known properties, which they then use for calibration. Not to mention, earth based observatories have gigantic mirrors and huge appatures (or however that is spelt, I'm a non-native speaker)
my father is a retired aerospace engineer specializing in satellite optics. my father worked on the SPITZER telescope among other projects. pretty interesting hearing him talk about work, even though he never really talked about work. when he did I was very much interested. love that nerd of a father. total macho geek he is.
+CockatooDude this video actually said said my father once said. in, 1995 when I was in 8th visiting my dad we were talking while working around the house. my father told me about his job but nothing that would effect his TSC. he told me they work on projects that won't be made public or be used in 30 years. one project he said was, you could go on the world wide web and type a coordinate and view your house and see the book your neighbor is reading. he explained to me the optics are much like a microscope but in space, and in order to see the detail needed the atmospheric stuff needs to be clear, and the pixel resolution needs to be better for it to work. 20 years later we have google earth. my father til this day believes we have the technology to read letters from a book while in space. I'm not a an engineer so I haven't got a clue as to what he knows, or the technical jargon he used to explain his nerdy job.
Many people think spy satellites are to spy on secrets or targets that the United States can kill and destroy, but they're also used for when an adversary might be launching an attack on your city.
You cant go much under 5cm resolution no matter how good your camera is due to there being 30+km of air in the way and even tiny amounts of air density changes cause enough heat haze in that much to mess up resolution.
+Gordon Lawrence That's not even the main reason. The resolution of an image is limited by the aparture of the camera. You'd need a mirror with a diameter a few times bigger than Hubble's to get to that resolution.
NSA was donating Hubble 'cousins' to NASA code named KH-11 Kennan. It looks like Hubble but has shorter focal length so they nicknamed it 'Stubby Hubble' and even NASA was impressed with the technology back in the 80's a decade before Hubble. But NASA is still can't figure out how to get some use of it because it was designed to look at earth with wide field of view rather than galaxy hunter narow field of view.
+Gordon Lawrence adaptive optics solves that and is a very OLD technology and quite mature today. when used with light field cameras like that used in newer narrow field view as opposed to regional focus spy sats projected resolution is 2.5cm over about a 2acre area at a depth of about 150ft.
Sweet. Can you guys do an episode on the evolution of chem trails, too? There's some really interesting documentation on the switching from mercury based vapors to more selective thallium filaments, but you might have to look around pretty hard for it.
Peter Petersen Don't be ridiculous. Even if lizard people existed, they wouldn't have the metabolism or temperature maintenance to survive and remain productive in the housing environments of humans. But let's be honest. There's no way in hell all that fluff coming out of planes is burning fuel. Totally different color, and not the right quantity. And we ALL know the government has countless reasons to want to suppress the undermasses, as a means of control and stability.
These days they don't just take photos, they capture video (of all major US cities) at 1cm resolution. They can also use oblique angles to see inside buildings/cars. I have personally seen a demo by the DOD that allowed them to read a numberplate and ID a suspect in a car in real-time. (I work for the AGO)
If you're looking at the ocean, or wilderness then you're probably seeing satellite images. If you're looking at cities, or you can see details smaller than a car, then it's aircraft.
The size of the picture doesn't say anything about how detailed the picture is. Hubble probably doesn't have the resolution to even pick up a earth sized planet.
For a high resolution spy camera look at Argus, it's mainly used on the albatross/predator or mq-9 style drones but it's made up of hundreds of phone style camera sensors and can see very small things on the ground
You can do some pretty amazing things with computational photo processing. People like to make fun of the CSI "enhance" line, but that is actually real now, especially if you have multiple photos of the same object. I bet we can get that license number.
A major problem for the US at the start of the Cold War was getting reliable information about the Soviet nuclear program. Long range reconnaissance aircraft weren't very successful. Too slow and with an insufficient ceiling allowing for relatively easy interception. Eventually the U2 filled the role (until it's spectacular failure) and replacement by the exceptional SR 71, but even before that there was an interesting program that was the predecessor of the spy satellite. Born of the WW2 experience of long range high altitude balloons (essentially a failure by Japan but they did cross all the way across the Pacific from Japan) the US experimented with its own long range spy balloons (apparently Roswell being one such crashed ballon). I believe most of us would be interested to see if there are any declassified reports about the experiments as well as any missions that may have been carried out.
According to Sgt Karl Wolfe (U.S. Airforce), and John Maynard (Defence Intelligence Agency) and several others we had the technology to photograph number plates in the late 1970's!!! Even Merle Shane McDow (U.S. Navy Atlantic Command) stated this was normal within Command sections to have very high resolution photographs from satellites routed to earth receiving stations and from there to various agencies.
Counting the pixels on some things in Google Earth, I've finding the typical resolution on google earth approaches 10 cm. A minivan (make unknown) is 11 pixels across. Light poles under 20cm diameter are two pixels wide. Street stripes (at about 15 cm) are 2 px wide. The 4" diameter trees in my front yard are visible as 1-2 pixel wide.
i heard from a space agency i won't name that they have satelites with cameras that can see you smoking a zig. she said they have a 5mm accuaracy, if i remember correctly. then she said that the pictures have to be dumbed down to about 30cm per pixel for leagal reasons if they are published.
If Hubble were trained on your front lawn, they would be able to measure how tall the grass is. So count on it. Those $5,000 hammers paid for some pretty sensitive government equipment.
considering that the KH-11 series (first launched 1976) had a theoretical resolution of 10-15 cm, I feel good about the odds it's gotten rather better in the last few (forty) years....
Means nothing unless it's a clear sky. Slightest bit of cloud and it doesn't matter what resolution you have. Pollution over populated areas would also distort the image.
+ZefVolk Google Earth uses a mix of data for a wide range of levels of detail. The best looking images are all aerial photography, not satellite, as you would expect, but zooming out will eventually get you looking at commercial and declassified military/scientific datasets. A rather neat tech when you dig into what they're doing.
The question is whether these 15cm resolution pictures are raw data from the satellites or already refined to the maximum. If the former is true, much could be done by superposition (comparing pixels belonging to the same object on two different pictures) or other computer vision methods.
The best nautical charts in the world are at 2 mm resolution, but that is only one country and it is a small one. Been out of the loop for over a decade, so the resolutions are likely better, but data being what it is, real time is the constraint. That and coverage area tied to time.
It just occurred to me that the NRO might be the front runners in the whole computer vision, deep learning thing. I mean its obvious that they have a lot of data to sort through, and they probably have the funding
What would Hubble's resolution be if it could look down at earth? How much does atmospheric distortion limit photography even if the camera was really Good?
That google earth image is probably not a satelite picture. Allthough it is called satelite view, the high resolution pictures we see are aerial photos meaningnthey’ve been captured by planes or balloons.
Google's higher-resolution "Satellite View" of cities isn't using data from satellites. It's (mostly) from light planes. See Wikipedia: Google Maps: "Google Maps' satellite view is a `top-down' view; most of the high-resolution imagery of cities is aerial photography taken from aircraft flying at 800 to 1,500 feet (240 to 460 m), while most other imagery is from satellites.[2] Much of the available satellite imagery is no more than three years old and is updated on a regular basis.[3]"
+Stephan Zielinski Agree we use them at work. In Australia the images are stored in a centralised database that cost the end user such as Google a fee for using the photo. They have the same images as us. I thought this info was common knowledge.
. . the highest resolution "allowed for commercial satellites" - which means there are (non-commercial) satellites with higher resolutions being used by our government. to put it simply - our government can see absolutely everything.
uhm...the resolution of the images I see in Google Maps looks very very good to me, like, I could easily identify the make and model of cars...! Maybe they're actually taken from planes, rather than from satellites?
I really hope you guys do a video on the major new space mission, Breakthrough Starshot which is being backed by Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg! As little as 20 years for us to explore Alpha Centauri?? Yeah, you gotta do a video on THAT!
How do we not know what the best resolutions our cameras can do? Can't camera designers put a stab at the best resolution we could get. If we could make very good cameras wouldn't the same tech be used to make telescopes.
I guess modern satellites get down to a 5 cm resolution or better, with image enhancing technology, where image enhancing just means a computer's best guess as to what it might be that the camera took. We call that artificial intelligence: If there are usually squirrels in an area, the computer will assume that the four-pixel block is a squirrel, while it might as well be a cat.
Ridiculous but true statement: the cold war sounds kinda fun... I mean at least with stuff like this. The prevailing tension and fear were pretty negative...
The quality of commercial satellite cameras doesn't sound right to me. A website called Nearmaps used to be free and with their google earth type imagery I was able to zoom in on my house and count the loops in a water hose that was coiled in the garden, and that would have to be a much higher resolution then what is talked about here.
The problem with space computers is that they have to be shielded and rigorously tested to be useful after being bombarded with solar radiation. If those military eggheads figured out how to put a 2012 pentium equivalent in orbit, i'd be worried.
Question: Why not legalize resolutions better than 25 cm? What's the benefit of the law (see 3:15)? It's not just a relic of the Cold War, since this censorship was updated in 2014. Thanks for anyone's guess!
Uhh...no. Money, while abundant, is often focused on other things. The major issue though is that satellites travel fast. And it's not like they can slow down either, their speed is how they stay in orbit. Planes lower to the ground work far better. But there's that whole thing about trying to not be noticed...annoying detail! I'd highly recommend reading this article: what-if.xkcd.com/32/ =)
The question of what resolution the government could get is pretty easy to answer. Lets assume they spent a lot of money on it, so it's probably near diffraction limited, and let's say it's the size of the Hubble telescope. So we have a 2.4m diameter telescope. A cursory look suggests there are imaging satellites ~700km up, but we can probably assume they are possibly closer. Lets use the ISS as our altitude meter stick, putting us at 330km at the lowest. Assuming diffraction limit, a 2.4m lens, and a 330km orbit across the visible spectrum (up to 700nm) I come up with a resolution of 5.8cm. If we want to use just 400nm light (getting into the ultra-violet) we get a resolution of 3.35cm. Might be able to read a headline.
Spy sats from the old days had altitudes of 148km, giving us 1.5cm resolution on ultraviolet. Atmospheric turbulence aside (lets assume perfect adaptive optics)
![BLACK BAG - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters March 14](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Du0Xp8WX_7I/mqdefault.jpg)
So, you could say that spy satellites kicked the bucket....
I'll be here all week folks...
don quet yer dea job
+Tekrothebountyhunter Huh? Doesn't make sense
Master Chef its a funny way of saying "don't quit your day job"
Master Chef A joke's not funny if you have to explain it...
Tekrothebountyhunter get on my level
The government can't see me, I wear a tin foil hat.
+Q-Hack! Oh you are a tin man. I always wonder who this person is when I watch through satellites.
That's why we developed the tin foil seeking missiles.
Contact, it wat they say before starting a engine, meaning gosh dang it stand clear, or you could burn ur unit off. Lol
Even if the airplanes didn't manage to catch the film in the falling bucket, I would imagine that the buckets were water proof, so the film could still be recovered. It seems that they wanted to catch it with the airplanes just to ensure that no one else got to the bucket before they did.
+Physics Videos by Eugene Khutoryansky The opposite, actually. If the canister was dropped into the ocean, they wanted to ensure that the enemy couldn't ever recover it and discover the exact capabilities of the spy satellite. They used solid salt plugs that would dissolve in water and cause the capsule to sink to the bottom of the ocean if the recovery failed.
+Physics Videos by Eugene Khutoryansky The buckets had a salt plug that would dissolve if left in water for more than a day. So if they missed, the film was usually lost.
No, the buckets were designed to sink fast. The Russians knew where we caught them and we could not risk the Russians finding out where we were looking.
The biggest limitation of satellite imagery these days is Diffraction Limits. Due to the way light moves through the atmosphere, it's practically impossible to get better than about 10-15cm resolution without being in a very low orbit or having ludicrously sized imaging apertures.
+Ashley Nova Also the movement of the atmosphere
Don't observatories use lasers to correct for that? Couldn't the same be done in reverse?
+Jon Dyson then your spy satellite would quite bad at being stealthy, since high wattage lasers would be easily detected by the enemy. And, when astronomers use lasers its to create an apparent "fake" star with very well known properties, which they then use for calibration. Not to mention, earth based observatories have gigantic mirrors and huge appatures (or however that is spelt, I'm a non-native speaker)
satellites don’t need to utilize light to garner information.
The way you speak is just so fluid, it's amazing! Hahaha
Nice video as always, love you guys at Scishow!
I refuse to believe that, after five years on RUclips, SciShow still doesn't have the budget to buy this guy a goddam undershirt
no one does; and I used to think that this was a family show
Blech!
Instead of cameras there should be manned satellites with military space dudes looking through insanely big magnifying glass.
Accidentally lighting stuff on fire kilometres below.
Josh Adams those ppl look like ants......hmmmmm
That was actually considered with the Manned Orbital Laboratory, and flown by the soviets with Almaz
In the words of the immortal idubbztv, thats pretty good.
same
+Uni Porpoise gave me cancer, tho
+Uni Porpoise what are you?
+Uni Porpoise Why say it when you can use your chrome plugin?
Can you do an episode about space junk? How much is in orbit, how we'll deal with it and how dangerous it is.
this do this. this guy knows what's up.
+stiimuli I thought they already did an episode about the Kessler effect. But if not, SciShow please cover this.
+Bradknightable Literally.
I bet the military can see a license plate from space easily.
my father is a retired aerospace engineer specializing in satellite optics. my father worked on the SPITZER telescope among other projects. pretty interesting hearing him talk about work, even though he never really talked about work. when he did I was very much interested. love that nerd of a father. total macho geek he is.
+morelli tech Man that must be awesome.
+CockatooDude this video actually said said my father once said. in, 1995 when I was in 8th visiting my dad we were talking while working around the house. my father told me about his job but nothing that would effect his TSC. he told me they work on projects that won't be made public or be used in 30 years. one project he said was, you could go on the world wide web and type a coordinate and view your house and see the book your neighbor is reading. he explained to me the optics are much like a microscope but in space, and in order to see the detail needed the atmospheric stuff needs to be clear, and the pixel resolution needs to be better for it to work. 20 years later we have google earth. my father til this day believes we have the technology to read letters from a book while in space. I'm not a an engineer so I haven't got a clue as to what he knows, or the technical jargon he used to explain his nerdy job.
It's even more cool when you realize that his job was to keep you safe.
Many people think spy satellites are to spy on secrets or targets that the United States can kill and destroy, but they're also used for when an adversary might be launching an attack on your city.
Holy shit.... that's a POWERFUL lenses
You cant go much under 5cm resolution no matter how good your camera is due to there being 30+km of air in the way and even tiny amounts of air density changes cause enough heat haze in that much to mess up resolution.
+Gordon Lawrence
That's not even the main reason. The resolution of an image is limited by the aparture of the camera. You'd need a mirror with a diameter a few times bigger than Hubble's to get to that resolution.
@superdau thats not relevant to my argument. I was talking about theoretical limits.
NSA was donating Hubble 'cousins' to NASA code named KH-11 Kennan. It looks like Hubble but has shorter focal length so they nicknamed it 'Stubby Hubble' and even NASA was impressed with the technology back in the 80's a decade before Hubble. But NASA is still can't figure out how to get some use of it because it was designed to look at earth with wide field of view rather than galaxy hunter narow field of view.
Alpha Adhito if they still had a shuttle then a new mirror and collimating lens might sort that out.
+Gordon Lawrence adaptive optics solves that and is a very OLD technology and quite mature today. when used with light field cameras like that used in newer narrow field view as opposed to regional focus spy sats projected resolution is 2.5cm over about a 2acre area at a depth of about 150ft.
Sweet. Can you guys do an episode on the evolution of chem trails, too?
There's some really interesting documentation on the switching from mercury based vapors to more selective thallium filaments, but you might have to look around pretty hard for it.
Lol
+YCCCm7 Then there are some nice Lizard men waiting underground, too I guess
+YCCCm7 lol
Peter Petersen
Don't be ridiculous. Even if lizard people existed, they wouldn't have the metabolism or temperature maintenance to survive and remain productive in the housing environments of humans.
But let's be honest. There's no way in hell all that fluff coming out of planes is burning fuel. Totally different color, and not the right quantity.
And we ALL know the government has countless reasons to want to suppress the undermasses, as a means of control and stability.
YCCCm7
Phew, you're actually serious about it. I was just making fun of you, i'm not going to argue about all this crap. Sry dude
These days they don't just take photos, they capture video (of all major US cities) at 1cm resolution. They can also use oblique angles to see inside buildings/cars. I have personally seen a demo by the DOD that allowed them to read a numberplate and ID a suspect in a car in real-time. (I work for the AGO)
"computer softwares are not good at recognizing small objects" lol, challenge accepted
+Xiao'sChannel *removes pants*
Not good doesn't mean cannot
+Alpha Adhito right, what i mean is i study pretty much exactly that subject, machine learning
+Xiao'sChannel of course the Asian would...
+Oliver Wilkes ahh lol
That was especially insightful. cheers
What? No Falcon 9 news? They did it.
+Jose “JJ” Foldy We record our news episodes on Tuesdays and upload them on Friday. We'll have a video about Falcon 9 on the 15th. They did it!
can you remind me what falcon 9 was?
dsc
Vaibhav Gupta You *ahem* missed the boat on this comment. Try again next time
+iota-09 9 Merlin + a Merlin Vacuum :D
That was a cool episode.
I love this guy
Well in the end resolution is limited by the optical equipment onboard the satellite... size of the telescope is the key here.
Informative
Google Earth uses footage gathered from aircraft, not satellites in most cases.
+Lawrence Rhodes Well I didn't know about that, interesting
If you're looking at the ocean, or wilderness then you're probably seeing satellite images.
If you're looking at cities, or you can see details smaller than a car, then it's aircraft.
and then scishow was drone striked rip
+Connor O'Brien What's Scishow?
Hubble sees millions of miles away and it looks hd 😂
it is long exposure photos.
The size of the picture doesn't say anything about how detailed the picture is. Hubble probably doesn't have the resolution to even pick up a earth sized planet.
+Conor Breslin It looks HD because it's pictures of fucking huge shit
+Noodler the difference in your comment and his ahah fucking huge shit haha brilliant
+Conor Breslin Gotta be casual no
1:07
Ok...
Hey in that before & after shot, I noticed you used the Niagara Falls!
My favorite talker!!!!!!!!
I was told that a lot of the High Res Google image are from Plains not satellites? Am i correct in this understanding?
+Robert Steele Yes
For a high resolution spy camera look at Argus, it's mainly used on the albatross/predator or mq-9 style drones but it's made up of hundreds of phone style camera sensors and can see very small things on the ground
You can do some pretty amazing things with computational photo processing. People like to make fun of the CSI "enhance" line, but that is actually real now, especially if you have multiple photos of the same object. I bet we can get that license number.
A major problem for the US at the start of the Cold War was getting reliable information about the Soviet nuclear program. Long range reconnaissance aircraft weren't very successful. Too slow and with an insufficient ceiling allowing for relatively easy interception. Eventually the U2 filled the role (until it's spectacular failure) and replacement by the exceptional SR 71, but even before that there was an interesting program that was the predecessor of the spy satellite. Born of the WW2 experience of long range high altitude balloons (essentially a failure by Japan but they did cross all the way across the Pacific from Japan) the US experimented with its own long range spy balloons (apparently Roswell being one such crashed ballon). I believe most of us would be interested to see if there are any declassified reports about the experiments as well as any missions that may have been carried out.
Who’s here during the actual corona days 😉
According to Sgt Karl Wolfe (U.S. Airforce), and John Maynard (Defence Intelligence Agency) and several others we had the technology to photograph number plates in the late 1970's!!! Even Merle Shane McDow (U.S. Navy Atlantic Command) stated this was normal within Command sections to have very high resolution photographs from satellites routed to earth receiving stations and from there to various agencies.
Back in the corona days
Can you guys do a video about time dial atom please??????????????? It would really help to actually understand it somewhat mathematically
Counting the pixels on some things in Google Earth, I've finding the typical resolution on google earth approaches 10 cm. A minivan (make unknown) is 11 pixels across. Light poles under 20cm diameter are two pixels wide. Street stripes (at about 15 cm) are 2 px wide. The 4" diameter trees in my front yard are visible as 1-2 pixel wide.
So how long do they reveal an area on the map and what's the cooldown?
Niagara falls at 2:43. Thats my home town.
I used to receive the parachuted photos, and they were better than suggested.
Some commercial companies and military contractors already have the capability to read your license plate from space
source: saw it in a documentary
i heard from a space agency i won't name that they have satelites with cameras that can see you smoking a zig. she said they have a 5mm accuaracy, if i remember correctly. then she said that the pictures have to be dumbed down to about 30cm per pixel for leagal reasons if they are published.
Wow, they catch that thing mid-air with a plane... Incredible.
If Hubble were trained on your front lawn, they would be able to measure how tall the grass is.
So count on it. Those $5,000 hammers paid for some pretty sensitive government equipment.
If you was walking down the side walk and a quarter fell out of your pocket heads up?, they can tell you what the year was on that quarter !!!!
considering that the KH-11 series (first launched 1976) had a theoretical resolution of 10-15 cm, I feel good about the odds it's gotten rather better in the last few (forty) years....
Would "Lytro"-type cameras be useful for military use? Or would variable focus not matter at those distances?
ty
The more important you are, the better your toys are.
If they were catching film buckets out of the sky in the 60's it makes my head spin trying to imagine what cutting edge tech is today/1
Means nothing unless it's a clear sky. Slightest bit of cloud and it doesn't matter what resolution you have. Pollution over populated areas would also distort the image.
Hey that is the same method batman used!
Aren't the images on Google earth taken from aerial photography planes, not satellites?
+ZefVolk Google Earth uses a mix of data for a wide range of levels of detail. The best looking images are all aerial photography, not satellite, as you would expect, but zooming out will eventually get you looking at commercial and declassified military/scientific datasets. A rather neat tech when you dig into what they're doing.
+RealLuckless I thought they just used two animated dudes in a hot air balloon.
The question is whether these 15cm resolution pictures are raw data from the satellites or already refined to the maximum. If the former is true, much could be done by superposition (comparing pixels belonging to the same object on two different pictures) or other computer vision methods.
The background was very complementary to your shirt.
Drones on the other hand can get a lot closer and with greater detail.Coming soon to a city near you.
The best nautical charts in the world are at 2 mm resolution, but that is only one country and it is a small one. Been out of the loop for over a decade, so the resolutions are likely better, but data being what it is, real time is the constraint. That and coverage area tied to time.
The whole bucket thing is crazy.
+PinkChucky15
Your crazy
It just occurred to me that the NRO might be the front runners in the whole computer vision, deep learning thing. I mean its obvious that they have a lot of data to sort through, and they probably have the funding
They can see right into your home
If this would be teach in school under wich subject should be?
academicned6 definitely won’t it English be
What would Hubble's resolution be if it could look down at earth?
How much does atmospheric distortion limit photography even if the camera was really
Good?
One only needs to look at deuterium fluoride lasers, to know certain wavelengths of light are not affected by atmosphere.
they probably focus more on ground elevation, air composition, radiation, heat and other things that may hide evil villains :P
They should be looking in government buildings if they're looking vor villains :P
Humans are such a fearful, tribal, violent species. But I guess those traits do end up producing some amazing technology.
That google earth image is probably not a satelite picture. Allthough it is called satelite view, the high resolution pictures we see are aerial photos meaningnthey’ve been captured by planes or balloons.
Why were there no images of satellites in this video?
Meanwhile in Tennessee, a guy with a disposable camera keeps building taller ladders.
Google's higher-resolution "Satellite View" of cities isn't using data from satellites. It's (mostly) from light planes. See Wikipedia: Google Maps: "Google Maps' satellite view is a `top-down' view; most of the high-resolution imagery of cities is aerial photography taken from aircraft flying at 800 to 1,500 feet (240 to 460 m), while most other imagery is from satellites.[2] Much of the available satellite imagery is no more than three years old and is updated on a regular basis.[3]"
+Stephan Zielinski Agree we use them at work. In Australia the images are stored in a centralised database that cost the end user such as Google a fee for using the photo. They have the same images as us. I thought this info was common knowledge.
We can see a galaxy million light years away so logically.... go out, look up and smile for your next NSA profile photo...
. . the highest resolution "allowed for commercial satellites" - which means there are (non-commercial) satellites with higher resolutions being used by our government. to put it simply - our government can see absolutely everything.
Hi! 😊😊😊
uhm...the resolution of the images I see in Google Maps looks very very good to me, like, I could easily identify the make and model of cars...! Maybe they're actually taken from planes, rather than from satellites?
Is he saying there's an actual law prohibiting high-resolution cameras at 3:16?
Hey!!!!
I really hope you guys do a video on the major new space mission, Breakthrough Starshot which is being backed by Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg! As little as 20 years for us to explore Alpha Centauri?? Yeah, you gotta do a video on THAT!
How do we not know what the best resolutions our cameras can do? Can't camera designers put a stab at the best resolution we could get. If we could make very good cameras wouldn't the same tech be used to make telescopes.
I guess modern satellites get down to a 5 cm resolution or better, with image enhancing technology, where image enhancing just means a computer's best guess as to what it might be that the camera took. We call that artificial intelligence: If there are usually squirrels in an area, the computer will assume that the four-pixel block is a squirrel, while it might as well be a cat.
+Eisi Kater I don't think you can get down to 5cm.
You will run into problems with the atmosphere distorting the picture.
Ridiculous but true statement: the cold war sounds kinda fun... I mean at least with stuff like this. The prevailing tension and fear were pretty negative...
shoutout mr darby
cool stuff
secret stuff
what about all the other important advances in technology not mentioned
The quality of commercial satellite cameras doesn't sound right to me.
A website called Nearmaps used to be free and with their google earth type imagery I was able to zoom in on my house and count the loops in a water hose that was coiled in the garden, and that would have to be a much higher resolution then what is talked about here.
The problem with space computers is that they have to be shielded and rigorously tested to be useful after being bombarded with solar radiation. If those military eggheads figured out how to put a 2012 pentium equivalent in orbit, i'd be worried.
I remember hearing some of the best ones could identify a grapefruit. so a 15 is cm res.
My thingy appears in any resolution because it's sooooo big
now I know how the name photobucket came from
"drop that bucket"
When looking at google maps i find it that the resolution of images is higher than the claimed 25cm.
+FinalplayerRyu They use planes. Far closer to the ground, means far better image.
Question: Why not legalize resolutions better than 25 cm? What's the benefit of the law (see 3:15)? It's not just a relic of the Cold War, since this censorship was updated in 2014. Thanks for anyone's guess!
Thank god, I don't want the Military to see me having sex on the roof of my house
They could probably find out using infrared.
I read somewhere that satellites could see a quarter on there ground. Now, idk if that's true, I'm sure it's not far from the truth.
We just swipe up Freddie Wong now.
a group of electronic torturers/satellite terrorist called the ROOF crashed 2 satellites at Tyrone Woods trailer park in Tyrone twp MI in 2014-2015.
You're a special kind of special, aren't you? (BTW: I thought they were called the "the woot")
Google Earth and Maps pictures are not from satellites, but from overflying planes.
I worked there,when i was 19. the place where the buckets came .
can a worm hole and a black hole collide, and if so, what would happen?
why wouldn't current spy satellites have insane resolution? I'm sure money isn't an issue, and the tech doesn't seem too out of reach.
Uhh...no. Money, while abundant, is often focused on other things. The major issue though is that satellites travel fast. And it's not like they can slow down either, their speed is how they stay in orbit. Planes lower to the ground work far better. But there's that whole thing about trying to not be noticed...annoying detail! I'd highly recommend reading this article: what-if.xkcd.com/32/
=)
The resolution isn't the limiting factor; it's the quality of the optics.
The question of what resolution the government could get is pretty easy to answer. Lets assume they spent a lot of money on it, so it's probably near diffraction limited, and let's say it's the size of the Hubble telescope. So we have a 2.4m diameter telescope. A cursory look suggests there are imaging satellites ~700km up, but we can probably assume they are possibly closer. Lets use the ISS as our altitude meter stick, putting us at 330km at the lowest.
Assuming diffraction limit, a 2.4m lens, and a 330km orbit across the visible spectrum (up to 700nm) I come up with a resolution of 5.8cm. If we want to use just 400nm light (getting into the ultra-violet) we get a resolution of 3.35cm.
Might be able to read a headline.
Spy sats from the old days had altitudes of 148km, giving us 1.5cm resolution on ultraviolet. Atmospheric turbulence aside (lets assume perfect adaptive optics)
Question : Could we have developed language if we didn't have self-awareness or consciousness?