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I wonder when are we going to have some low resolution (good enough to spot a car) realtime recording of the full globe. I know it's tons of data but with some

• casabarata 8y ago
  The dream of the NSA. Seriously.. How is that a good idea? We get upset when FB gives away some data to an organization that ends up using it for running election campaigns. What will happen if every person, sitting in their backyard, on the balcony, playing outside etc. is being recorded 24/7?
• std_throwaway 8y ago
  You can already track most people by their radio tracking devices.
  • bronson 8y ago
    Except when they're in Airplane Mode.
    • chinathrow 8y ago
      Are we sure the device is 100% offline?
      • grkvlt 8y ago
        Yes.
• abhiminator 8y ago
  >realtime recording of the full globe The scale of infrastructure needed for something like that would be staggering. Important question is, for what purpose? Assuming it's the aviation safety domain we're talking about, I think improving aircraft connectivity to ground stations and enhancing real-time monitoring [0] would be a superior solution than to invest in array of video-recording infrastructure to keep tabs on the planet--this without even factoring in the privacy concerns that may arise out of continual recording and access to the said data. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-avoid-another-malaysia-flight-370-1405100436 https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-avoid-another-malaysia-f...
  • toomuchtodo 8y ago
    The new Iridium Next satellites carry ADS-B receivers to enable global coverage. I leave it up to the reader to determine difficulty level of tasking nearby optical surveillance satellites when an anomalous flight path is detected. https://aireon.com/resources/iridium-next/ https://aireon.com/resources/iridium-next/
• michael_miller 8y ago
  Thanks to Elon Musk, we have real-time tracking for modern airplanes! Iridium NEXT has ADS-B receivers on each of their satellites which can see all ADS-B equipped airplanes around the entire globe. It's mostly up-and-running, you can follow the progress at: https://www.iridiumnext.com/ https://www.iridiumnext.com/ Background on the system for tracking: https://aireon.com/ https://aireon.com/
  • mrguyorama 8y ago
    I didn't realize ADS-B had that kind of range.
    • convivialdingo 8y ago
      I’m able to track aircraft around 100 miles away using a cheap receiver and a 50’ wire antenna. About $50 total investment. I would guess commercial aircraft must have fairly high watt transmitters.
      • zkms 8y ago
        They have upward-facing transmit antennae for 1090MHz ADS-B/extended-squitter for TCAS reasons.
  • sjburt 8y ago
    What does it have to with Elon? The owner is Iridium Communications and the satellites are produced by Thales. They're being launched on Falcon 9 but they could have been launched on anything.
    • valuearb 8y ago
      Iridium was able to be resurrected only because the Falcon 9 slashed the cost to replace their satellites, it was a shell of a bankrupt company for nearly two decades.
      • 8y ago
• NickBusey 8y ago
  Or does some government actually already have this, but doesn't use it in these cases due to not wanting to reveal their advantage?
  • abhiminator 8y ago
    I bet the United States' National Reconnaissance Office already has satellites that have the capability. And it's fair to assume they won't be redirecting sensitive military hardware for civilian purposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office
    • planteen 8y ago
      Assuming for a moment the NRO has developed suitable optics to image the Earth real-time from geo at say 1 FPS, along with a sensor, and way to pipe everything back to the ground. There are still a couple unavoidable major flaws with such a system: 1) Clouds 2) You can't see all latitudes from geo, the higher the latitude gets, the more marginal the images will be. So I really doubt such a capability exists. Look a the FOV for a geo satellite like GOES-15: http://www.wmo-sat.info/oscar/satellites/view/151 http://www.wmo-sat.info/oscar/satellites/view/151
      • Rebelgecko 8y ago
        I don't understand where #2 is coming from. There's plenty of places to go in space other than GEO.
        • planteen 8y ago
          How are you going to continuously monitor the same area on the Earth without being in GEO? We'd know about a constellation of NRO satellites with continuous coverage of an area of the Earth from the folks at satobs.org.
          • 6nf 8y ago
• i_am_good 8y ago
  Check this out: https://earthnow.com/ https://earthnow.com/
  • acidburnNSA 8y ago
    Good old Nathan Myhrvold!
• jorblumesea 8y ago
  It's almost certain the US government knows more than it lets on, but feels the disclosure of information might reveal sources and methods to a possible adversary.
  • oh_sigh 8y ago
    Maybe, but if that were the case, I would have suspected a search ship to 'happen upon' the wreckage at some point.
    • jorblumesea 8y ago
      I don't think they know where it is but they certainly are more informed than the other players. As I said, "more information", not omnipotent knowledge.
  • matt4077 8y ago
    If you're so certain, the US could just point at the location of the wreck without actually giving you any new information.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • valuearb 8y ago
      Yea, like most conspiracy theories, it's a pretty silly contention.
• tqkxzugoaupvwqr 8y ago
  The problem is that planes, afaik, do not continuously broadcast their position and health. If you don’t find the black boxes, you can’t figure out what happened. The investigators of MH370 were so desperate for any information of the possible flight path, they had to turn to the pings the jet engines sent to the manufacturer as part of their monitoring [1]. All we need is for passenger planes to broadcast regularly and in short intervals. No indiscriminate high-resolution global monitoring and data processing needed. [1] https://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2014/03/25/mh370-last-incomplete-ping-from-jet-not-understood/ https://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2014/03/25/mh370-la...
  • sp332 8y ago
    Airlines will track planes every 15 minutes starting in November. http://time.com/5137172/mh370-missing-plane/ http://time.com/5137172/mh370-missing-plane/ Some airlines have already met this goal.
    • j_jochem 8y ago
      I’m stumped as to why they would pick such a ridiculously low sampling rate. Crashes often play out in minutes, wouldn’t it make more sense to have sub-minute resolution? Or is sending a location ping more complicated than I think?
      • toomuchtodo 8y ago
        In places without terrestrial ADS-B receivers, you’re relying on space based bandwidth constrained networks to pipe the data to ground stations.
      • sp332 8y ago
        The goal is just to narrow down the search area after a crash. Even at 700 MPH you can only cover 175 miles in 15 minutes. That's a pretty tractable area to search for a blackbox ping. And that's if they have no other info about the crash.
        • 8y ago
• JaimeThompson 8y ago
  Iridium NEXT satellites contain ADS-B receivers for tracking planes that are broadcast ADS-B. https://aireon.com/resources/its-just-ads-b/ https://aireon.com/resources/its-just-ads-b/
• bitmapbrother 8y ago
  That solution is some time away. In the near term, I'd like to see the commercial aircraft engine OEM's start transmitting in flight GPS coordinates of their engines so that they can be tracked in real time. These engines currently transmit engine telemetry back to their OEM's so they can monitor their performance and condition, but I'm not sure of the time frequency it transmits the data back to the monitoring facility. In the case of Flight MH370, the Rolls Royce engines were transmitting engine telemetry, but it didn't contain the necessary information to be able to track its flight path and precisely determine where it ended up.
• froindt 8y ago
  I think there are a couple orders of magnitude difference between your idea and what it'd take to process. My googling shows 148.94 trillion square meters, with 18.6 trillion We'll being generous to say "good enough to spot a car" is 2 pixels with 1 meter pixel size. To be moderately confident it's a car, I'd guesstimate we'd need quite a bit higher resolution. With no compression and RGB 24 bit encoding, that's 3 bytes/pixel, or 446 TB of data per "frame" of our realtime recording. Of course that could be compressed down a TON, but regardless it's a staggeringly large quantity of data to work with. > some machine learning it should be possible to skip most of oceans forests and deserts (unless some unusual object appears in that area). As far as I can think through, you'd need to process the data in the oceans, forests, and deserts if you want to find unusual objects. We can't do a shortcut and say only 1/8 of the world is inhabited/developed in some way and that's all we're going to monitor. Perhaps you take 1/4 or 1/8 of the data from the vast amounts of uninteresting data and look for larger anomalies. No matter how you look at it, there'd be a ridiculous amount of data and processing required to do object detection on that scale.
  • TillE 8y ago
    Excellent back-of-the-envelope estimation. I've recently been doing some world simulation for games, and found that you quickly start pushing RAM limits if you want to represent an Earth-sized planet at square kilometer precision. Turns out the Earth is pretty big. Mars is more reasonable, with about a quarter of the surface area.
  • j88439h84 8y ago
    Googling suggests YouTube is using 10 PB/year. With compression I don't think the storage per se would be a problem for the IC. And if you're looking for that particular missing airplane, you could just look at the timestamped photo and see it there.
  • DrJokepu 8y ago
    I don’t disagree with anything you said here, but it reminds me an argument about IRC privacy from the ’90s. People frequently accused IRC networks of secretly logging private conversations, and the usual argument was that this would require such an immense amount of storage that any such effort would be astronomically expensive and entirely infeasible. I don’t know if that was really true even back then, but today it’s completely doable and done all the time (think Google Chat or Facebook Chat). My point is, times change, it’s entirely possible that in 20 years storing that much data will be completely possible.
• natosaichek 8y ago
  The largest earth-imaging constellation in the world can image the planet every day. Getting the data to the ground is a challenge, so my understanding is that they don't bother transmitting images obscured by clouds, or images of empty ocean. https://www.planet.com/ https://www.planet.com/ Updating the cadence to an ~hourly image would require ~2000 satellites, and updating it to every minute would require another 1.5 orders of magnitude... approximately 50,000 satellites. The downlink capabilities to pull that data off the satellites would be colossally huge. A tremendous number of groundstations with a huge array of antennae constantly coordinating and pulling data down. I'm sure Planet is heading in that direction, but it's actually hard to imagine the commercial value of such a mind-blowingly massive infrastructure investment. In contrast to some of the other commenters, I do _not_ think that the NRO or any other collection of government organizations has a planetary image datastream anywhere close to this. The number of satellites and quantity of data required is really mind blowingly immense. I think that the downlink stations would be impossible to conceal, so if we had such a capability, we'd know about it. It's also not necessary for their work - they typically task a satellite with watching an area of interest if they need to. They don't need 24/7 planet-wide monitoring.
  • ajross 8y ago
    > A tremendous number of groundstations with a huge array of antennae constantly coordinating and pulling data down. In the limit where you're talking about a satellite "instantaneously local" to every location on the planet, that becomes just one ground antenna per satellite to handle whichever one is nearest. Yeah, 50k stations are expensive, but not nearly as much as the satellites they are talking to.
    • sitkack 8y ago
      Satellites could easily spoof cellular towers, there is literally billions of ground stations, willing or not.
      • jsjohnst 8y ago
        Actually, no they couldn’t, assuming you’re talking about cell phones being the ground station. One, your cell phone doesn’t transmit with enough power to reach even a LEO satellite, and the existing protocols dictate a two way handshake. Second, what do you anticipate the phone to do with the data once it’s received?
• nofunsir 8y ago
  There already are such systems...said too much.
• jsjohnst 8y ago
  Wouldn’t it make more sense to mandate every commercial passenger plane transmit its location every second to a satellite (and be something that can’t be disabled from cockpit)? 1) the tech already exists (wouldn’t even require new satellites) 2) the costs involved are actually not very high 3) would help negate the security and reliability weaknesses of ADS-B.