8 ms·

Satellites Taking Pictures of Rockets Carrying More Satellites

214 points by privong 9y ago

natch 9y ago
Would love to see an actual speed version of this... what's the hurry?
- liamk 9y ago
  They stiched still images together to make the video, perhaps that created the speed up?
  - natch 9y ago
    Yes but that's configurable with a good tool.
- jessriedel 9y 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 9y 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 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 https://youtu.be/b7Ua4mXO23E
  - wollstonecraft 9y ago
    Their satellites have a one dimensional sensor that scans continuously.
    - orbital-decay 9y ago
      They are using 2D TDI CCDs, just like everyone else. This timelapse was likely shot with frame by frame exposures though. I'm not sure how it's possible with TDI.
      - kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
        Still inherently 1D. TDI sensors are not like area arrays.
- ChuckMcM 9y 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/ https://www.planet.com/company/approach/
  - jessriedel 9y 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.
    - andrewstuart2 9y ago
      As mentioned in parent, the rate you can capture depends on the resolution (i.e. image size in bytes), downlink speed, available memory, and length of the event. As the length of the event approaches infinity, the framerate you can capture is basically bandwidth / image size. `(mb/s)/mb = 1/s` (aka hz). Beyond that limit, the memory size / image size gives you a hard limit for the number of additional frames you can buffer. To get a constant frame rate, you want to spread that quantity over the duration of the event.
      - Evelin789 9y ago
        just as Bryan said I'm shocked that a student able to profit $7511 in 4 weeks on the computer . check this site out>>>>>>>>>>>http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ
- fudged71 9y ago
  There is a live HD zoomed video stream from the space station. Maybe someday they will catch one of these.
siscia 9y ago
Any of you have any idea of how much the images from planet.com cost?
- notahacker 9y ago
  Satellite image prices through a broker, including Planet's RapidEye constellation http://www.landinfo.com/satellite-imagery-pricing.html 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 9y 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?
    - notahacker 9y ago
      There is pansharpening (effectively improving the spatial resolution of colour images by combining them with sharper, higher spatial-resolution monochrome images) and using processing techniques to combine low-res images can certainly improve the effectiveness of detecting features which are smaller than the image pixel size, but I don't think anyone's likely to get comparable detail to a sub-1m or even a 5m pixel image out of combining 20m and 30m pixel images taken at different times.
      - Gravityloss 9y ago
        Why not? You can treat it as a statistical problem where you are given low Res samples of the actual data. I've done it myself on a school assignment. A matrix inversion was required. There are things like sensor shift cameras commercially available too. And stacking software for astronomers etc...
dopeboy 9y 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 9y ago
  Beyond close. We've been touching for years.
- Boothroid 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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_thibedeau 9y 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 9y 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.
oelmekki 9y 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 9y ago
  You may be excited about SpaceX plans.
- tenpies 9y ago
  It has basically fallen into a classic hype cycle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
  - oelmekki 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 9y ago
Vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires

214 points by privong 9y ago

natch 9y ago

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

liamk 9y ago
They stiched still images together to make the video, perhaps that created the speed up?
- natch 9y ago
  Yes but that's configurable with a good tool.
jessriedel 9y 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 9y 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 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 https://youtu.be/b7Ua4mXO23E
- wollstonecraft 9y ago
  Their satellites have a one dimensional sensor that scans continuously.
  - orbital-decay 9y ago
    They are using 2D TDI CCDs, just like everyone else. This timelapse was likely shot with frame by frame exposures though. I'm not sure how it's possible with TDI.
    - kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
      Still inherently 1D. TDI sensors are not like area arrays.
ChuckMcM 9y 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/ https://www.planet.com/company/approach/
- jessriedel 9y 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.
  - andrewstuart2 9y ago
    As mentioned in parent, the rate you can capture depends on the resolution (i.e. image size in bytes), downlink speed, available memory, and length of the event. As the length of the event approaches infinity, the framerate you can capture is basically bandwidth / image size. `(mb/s)/mb = 1/s` (aka hz). Beyond that limit, the memory size / image size gives you a hard limit for the number of additional frames you can buffer. To get a constant frame rate, you want to spread that quantity over the duration of the event.
    - Evelin789 9y ago
      just as Bryan said I'm shocked that a student able to profit $7511 in 4 weeks on the computer . check this site out>>>>>>>>>>>http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ
fudged71 9y ago
There is a live HD zoomed video stream from the space station. Maybe someday they will catch one of these.

siscia 9y ago

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

notahacker 9y ago
Satellite image prices through a broker, including Planet's RapidEye constellation http://www.landinfo.com/satellite-imagery-pricing.html 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 9y 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?
  - notahacker 9y ago
    There is pansharpening (effectively improving the spatial resolution of colour images by combining them with sharper, higher spatial-resolution monochrome images) and using processing techniques to combine low-res images can certainly improve the effectiveness of detecting features which are smaller than the image pixel size, but I don't think anyone's likely to get comparable detail to a sub-1m or even a 5m pixel image out of combining 20m and 30m pixel images taken at different times.
    - Gravityloss 9y ago
      Why not? You can treat it as a statistical problem where you are given low Res samples of the actual data. I've done it myself on a school assignment. A matrix inversion was required. There are things like sensor shift cameras commercially available too. And stacking software for astronomers etc...

dopeboy 9y 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 9y ago
Beyond close. We've been touching for years.
Boothroid 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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_thibedeau 9y 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 9y 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.

oelmekki 9y 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 9y ago
You may be excited about SpaceX plans.
tenpies 9y ago
It has basically fallen into a classic hype cycle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
- oelmekki 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 9y ago

Vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires