11 ms·
Black Sky satellites return images just 58 hours after launch
- ChuckMcM 6y agoThis is an interesting capability. Since the very first spy satellites were placed into orbit, adversaries have carefully tracked their orbits so that they could avoid exposure during an overpass. This form of cat and mouse game has had various options thrown at it, from satellites that can change their orbits, to "cover" satellites which operate as one thing and provide surveillance capability in addition to their "public" persona. SpaceX threw up 2 satellites on a ship that was carrying 60 separate satellites (the others being Starlink nodes). But it could throw up 60 black sky satellites if asked. Further it could do that fairly quickly[1] from time to request to launch using a flight proven booster. Or perhaps 30 satellites with their own booster engine to maximize the number of orbits they could reach. At some point continuous monitoring of a point on Earth becomes simply a question of cost. That can be kind of game changing from a geopolitical perspective. [1] Where quickly here is anywhere from 10 to 60 days depending on whether or not a company like black sky could have the upper stage on hand with the delivery system.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoWhy bother with this, instead of having the emerging sat constellations deployed in ways that offer continous coverage of any place on earth, anytime, from various angles, in all useful spectra? Call it iLive by Setec Astronomy. Maybe make it public in ways like OpenStreetMap, combine with something like Internet Archive, have it distributed by some P2P-protocol. Done. Global transparency/awareness for all. Next best thing to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect
- ricardobeat 6y agoPlanet Labs already has full coverage of the Earth, and with the latest SkySat (another 3 launched earlier today) they will have the ability to image the same point on earth 12x a day. I think it's very unlikely that the USA and maybe others don't have this capability already.
- 7952 6y agoDon't forget that many of those images will be of cloud.
- garmaine 6y agoThe USA does not. The NRO does not operate large fleets of small satellites. They have just a few big ones. The optics are way better though.
- natcombs 6y ago>> optics are way better though That was going to be my question. Doesn’t the NRO need big optical lenses for their missions? Are there any “telescopic” advancements that can fit into small sats that can meet their mission objectives?
- ChuckMcM 6y agoYes. My understanding of these things based mostly on trolling through the various digital imagery company websites, is that many of the small satellites can generate detail as good as the "big guys" (at least as far is known in open sources) by using a telescopic lens. The difference however is aperture. Given the size of the optics on a small satellite the amount of area it can cover at 1 meter per pixel resolution is much smaller than something with a very large aperture could. As a result if you take a 10 Mpixel image with 1 meter per pixel accuracy that is a region roughly 3.2km on a side. Not a particularly large area.
- gruez 6y ago>That can be kind of game changing from a geopolitical perspective. Don't forget from a civil rights perspective. Remember this[1] from a few years ago, or this[2] a few weeks ago? Now imagine that the government can do the same thing, all over the us, 24/7, with zero marginal cost. [1] https://www.cjr.org/watchdog/how-buzzfeed-news-revealed-hidden-spy-planes-in-us-airspace.php https://www.cjr.org/watchdog/how-buzzfeed-news-revealed-hidd... [2] https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/y3zvwj/military-fbi-flying-surveillance-planes-george-floyd-protesters https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/y3zvwj/military-fbi-flyin...
- JKCalhoun 6y agoYes, interesting. See a car speeding? The software knows where the car came from, will know where it is when "destinated". I suppose license-plate readers do something similar, but this is space-based, blanket, all-seeing. Brave new world....
- natcombs 6y ago>> Brave new world.... Did you mean Orwellian? Unless I have my dystopian novels confused
- Zancarius 6y agoI think the poster meant it as a colloquialism which itself was popularized (?) by Shakespeare; i.e. as a turn of phrase that inspired the title of Huxley's work.
- swagasaurus-rex 6y agoCars go underground, beneath underpasses, inside of parking garages. I can't imagine any way even 100% aerial visual coverage can possibly track individual cars with any degree of certainty.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoI would not be surprised if they were able to do a pretty decent job. Cars that go into parking garages are typically among the ones that later come out. Cars that pass beneath underpasses are generally among the ones that emerge from the other side. Etc. Clever software should easily be able follow all cars with very few errors.
- PoachedSausage 6y agoIt must be getting pretty crowded up in LEO. How long before we get a Kessler Effect? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
- ladberg 6y agoEven adding thousands more satellites the chance that any will hit each other is incredibly small, and even if they hit it's probably not going to cascade. The Kessler effect only becomes a real possibility once we start purposefully blowing up many satellites.
- outworlder 6y agoNot nearly crowded enough. Picture the ocean. Can we agree that it's immense? How many ships can we launch until it becomes too crowded? Now imagine the Earth has no land masses and oceans cover all of it. How many more ships can we add? Now imagine that the Earth is bigger than what it is. A few hundred KM larger in radius. Your oceans have become so much bigger now as they have a larger area. And now imagine your ships are not only on the surface, but they could be submarines, or they could be planes, all crossing one another without ever touching. This is what space looks like. It's ridiculously big. The only issue is that some orbits are way more useful than others, so they get more use. We can fit a crapton of stuff there, provided that we stop doing dumb things (like blowing up satellites). LEO also has plenty of drag, so they decay. Higher orbits are more problematic.
- throw0101a 6y ago> Picture the ocean. Can we agree that it's immense? How many ships can we launch until it becomes too crowded? Except that we're not worried about just the large things like "ships" (satellites), but all the small things as well. Something measuring 1 cm on a side can cause critical damage, and things that 10 cm would be catastrophic: * https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/12/11664668/iss-window-chip-space-debris-tim-peake https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/12/11664668/iss-window-chip-... Even "the impact from a tiny piece of space debris, possibly a paint flake or small metal fragment no bigger than a few thousandths of a millimetre across" can crack the windows on the ISS: * http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2016/05/Impact_chip http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2016/05/Impact_chip And I'd rather we worry about these things while they are not a problem, rather than later when they become one: an ounce of prevention and all that.
- sangnoir 6y agoHow powerful does an earth-based laser need to be to temporarily blind any optical sensors without damaging any other part so that "innocent" satellites are unaffected? It probably will be standard to illuminate up all suspect satellites coming up the horizon in this way at sensitive locations and/or sensitive times in this way
- nippoo 6y agoWhat, exactly, used to be so difficult about this? Do new satellites take time to train their orbits, or test systems, or otherwise commission when they're in the air? What technological changes have happened recently to make this feasible?
- garmaine 6y agoYes. All of the above.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoPretty much. However the biggest change is the capability per kilogram that can be packed into a satellite now. Today a 3U cubesat weighing roughly 20kg can take thousands of images, process them locally to manage for weather effects and orbital skew, and then transmit them to a single ground station several times a day. The first spy satellites weighed tons and literally dropped film canisters back into space to re-enter and be recovered by aircraft or helicopters which would then take the film to a laboratory to be developed[1]. Typically, a satellite would take a few weeks to both stabilize in the environment in space, calibrate its optics, take some test photos for analysis, re-calibrate based on those results, and then be ready to go. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_(satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_(satellite)
- dmurray 6y agoMaybe it wasn't always "so difficult", but was never worth optimising for before. I don't know of anything that would have made this impossible before if it had been made a design goal.
- k_sze 6y agoIt's also a bit hard to gauge and appreciate how much of an improvement the feat in TFA is, without previous numbers to compare to (preferably in the form of a timeline).
- noodlesUK 6y agoI think it’s funny that people are surprised by this. It’s not new technology really, the defence sector has had taskable satellite imagery for decades, it’s just a matter of the cost coming down to the point where it’s feasible commercially. That is super cool though. There are a lot of applications for space based real-time imagery that could be tremendously more useful to the majority of society than tracking bad guys.
- tpmx 6y agoA random example of a useful application: realtime forest fire detection. In e.g. Sweden during the summer months people are still paid (well, compensated for their expenses) to fly around in Cessnas looking for smoke plumes. Imagine being able to dispatch a helicopter to drown out a typical forest fire within 10 minutes of the fire starting while it's still small. That's a game changer.
- mschuster91 6y ago> Imagine being able to dispatch a helicopter to drown out a typical forest fire within 10 minutes of the fire starting while it's still small. That's a game changer. And not necessarily a good one. Many forest ecosystems depend on somewhat regular fires to "clean out" debris. The problem however is that "thanks" to climate change leading to drier forests, what once used to be a fire that only consumed fallen off leaves etc. while leaving the big trees unharmed now burns intense and long enough to actually damage the big trees. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
- namibj 6y agoSounds like you need to wait for the big trees to still be wet enough, but the leaves dried up, and then light a fire to have it burn while you're keeping an eye on it and know it won't burn down your nice forest.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoI knew this was true when google earth launched. Every conflict area (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc) has very up-to-date images. I assumed these were military image-requests making their way into the commercial imagery catalogue.
- outworlder 6y agoIf things go well, we'll soon enter a new technological boom. Like computers. I am surrounded by these things. Something like a smart watch is only feasible after a drastic decrease in cost and massive increases in capability. If you went back a few decades and suggested people would be strapping supercomputers on their wrists, you'd likely be committed to an institution. It would be unthinkable to devote the required amount of resources to such a frivolous task. A similar thing will happen with spacecraft. Right now, it is still expensive, but SpaceX dragged down the price enormously. This is likely to decrease even further, either due to competition, or with the likes of the Starship(how many satellites could we fit on that monstrosity?). This will enable entire new industries, both existing(satellites will become commodities), and also ones we have no idea about - yet. Pretty sure some "frivolous" tasks will pop up once this is cheap enough. And that's only unmanned flights. EDIT: I've found this amusing - that's in the direction of what I'm talking about, we are just missing the "1-click launch": https://www.rocketlabusa.com/book-my-launch/ https://www.rocketlabusa.com/book-my-launch/
- MauranKilom 6y agoThe difference here is that space is a lot more international (and thus harder to police) than your wrist. We really want to avoid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome, and so far humanity has shown a pretty terrible track record when it comes to exploiting earth's commodities or ensuring the prevention of long-term global disasters... Already we have astronomers being increasingly hindered by man-made objects dashing through the field of view of ground-based telescopes.
- cmehdy 6y agoScott Manley made a good youtube video about just how much of the "basic" stuff one can already see around the earth by recording the sky in a 360-degrees video from a deserted place[0]. The current trends in launches with little thinking about the long run reminds me a bit of how we've approached fossil fuels.. we're basically waiting to hit the wall hard before re-thinking our approach. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJNGi-bt9NM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJNGi-bt9NM
- asldkjaslkdj 6y agoI do not look forward to the time where something akin to Google Maps starts to approach real-time (yeah I realize the government can more or less do this, but I'm happy with being obscure enough to not catch their gaze)
- Cactus2018 6y agolarger image link https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/image-f-3.png https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/image-f-3....
- BooneJS 6y agoThe night sky, for those that can see the Milky Way, is going to look like Wall•E soon, right? Gone are the days of Iridium flares.
- xncl 6y agoThis website has one of the longest and worst cookie setting panels I've ever seen. I had to flick off about 8 sliders and scroll down forever to disable them...