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Earth to Techies: Let’s Map It All – Imaging the World Down to the Meter
- Bostonian 6y agoungated: https://archive.is/lg7n7 https://archive.is/lg7n7 Earth to Techies: Let’s Map It All: Imaging the world down to the meter will soon spur a navigation breakthrough. By Andy Kessler Wall Street Journal Feb. 28, 2021 12:04 pm ET "To make nuclear bombs, you float a gaseous uranium compound down long distances until molecules with the heavier U-238 isotope fall away, leaving only highly fissionable U-235. That’s why during the Cold War the U.S. flew U-2 spy planes over the Soviet Union to film the ground, so that analysts with lightboards and magnifying glasses could study photos looking for long, narrow buildings. And you thought your job was tedious? We’ve come a long way. But that was a while ago—what’s possible today? To find out, I recently spent some (Zoom) time with Dan Jablonsky, CEO of Maxar Technologies, a Westminster, Colo.-based satellite and imaging company that, as far as I can tell, is the state of the art. Circling every 94 minutes, Maxar’s satellites survey 3.5 million square kilometers of the Earth every day to capture images that are accurate down to a meter and are stored in a massive data set. Each satellite’s camera can be swung up to 50 degrees from overhead. Maxar has 17 years of imaging history. It stores 120 petabytes of data on Amazon’s servers." ...