The publication points out that the observational satellites can do good, too. They can help farmers monitor a crop's growth cycle, geologists better examine rock textures, and human rights organizations track refugee movement. And of course, other satellites do things like helping meteorologists predict the weather and making our phones and televisions work. Charlie Loyd, an imagery specialist at online mapmaker Mapbox, said he comes across a lot of misperceptions about satellites. Few places on Earth are seen from space at highest resolution more than once a month or so, and the clearest images are from airplanes, not satellites.
We rarely talk about the privacy risks from airplanes, partly because most of us have a realistic sense of what they can do," Loyd said in an email. Loyd said it's the responsibility of the Earth observation industry, which knows what satellites can do, to educate those who don't -- especially when it comes to easing unrealistic fears and starting conversations about real risks.
A licensing system and accountability do exist , he said. Some companies are even offering live video from space. Some of the most radical developments in Earth observation involve not traditional photography but rather radar sensing and hyperspectral images, which capture electromagnetic wavelengths outside the visible spectrum.
Clouds can hide the ground in visible light, but satellites can penetrate them using synthetic aperture radar, which emits a signal that bounces off the sensed object and back to the satellite.
It can determine the height of an object down to a millimeter. NASA has used synthetic aperture radar since the s, but the fact that the US approved it for commercial use only last year is testament to its power—and political sensitivity.
In , military officials supposedly blocked the release of radar satellite images that revealed the location of American nuclear submarines. While GPS data from cell phones is a legitimate privacy threat, you can at least decide to leave your phone at home. Meanwhile, farmers can use hyperspectral sensing to tell where a crop is in its growth cycle, and geologists can use it to detect the texture of rock that might be favorable to excavation.
But it could also be used, whether by military agencies or terrorists, to identify underground bunkers or nuclear materials. The resolution of commercially available imagery, too, is likely to improve further. What will make the imagery even more powerful is the ability to process it in large quantities.
Analytics companies like Orbital Insight and SpaceKnow feed visual data into algorithms designed to let anyone with an internet connection understand the pictures en masse. But burglars could also scan a city to determine which families are out of town most often and for how long.
Like all tools, satellite imagery is subject to misuse. Its apparent objectivity can lead to false conclusions, as when the George W. Bush administration used it to make the case that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical weapons in Iraq. Attempts to protect privacy can also backfire: in , a Russian mapping firm blurred out the sites of sensitive military operations in Turkey and Israel—inadvertently revealing their existence, and prompting web users to locate the sites on other open-source maps.
Capturing satellite imagery with good intentions can have unintended consequences too. At that height, an area known as a geosynchronous orbit, NROL will mingle with commercial telecommunications satellites, such as those used for TV broadcasts. Other surveillance satellites orbit at about km from Earth, which is in the region of the International Space Station. Whereas in the very early days, spy satellites flew around the km mark, which is barely in space at all.
Spy satellites "hoover up" of hundreds of thousands of cell phone calls or scour the dark web for terrorist activity. It takes a massive antenna, but you're able to sit over one spot and listen to all the communications traffic," says Baker. That's just a fraction of America's military satellites, and it could be more. But not all of them need necessarily be spy satellites. France and Germany have the most, with 9 and 7, respectively. That's not including joint operations, where the satellites are run by more than one country.
Globally, there are between 2, and 2, active satellites, including those used for non-military purposes , such as Earth observation, or massive satellite internet constellations, like SpaceX's Starlink. Military satellites account for about a fifth of all satellites. The film had to be returned to Earth in a capsule, caught by a parachute system — an aircraft carrying a "catching bucket" — and taken to a laboratory to be developed.
It could take days, weeks, sometimes even months before people on the ground would get to see the pictures, says Pat Norris , a former NASA engineer who worked on the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, and author of Spies in the Sky. Those early spy satellites tended to die after three or four weeks.
And they were limited by the amount of film they could carry. Soon enough, they got dragged back down by the friction of Earth's atmosphere, "but they had used up their film, so it didn't matter," says Norris. It did mean, however, that the Americans and Soviets launched new spy satellites every two weeks. Now, satellites last for years, decades even. By the late s and early 80s, spy satellites had moved into digital photography. But the satellites were often still limited, or constrained, by the number of images they could store, and the number or frequency of opportunities that had for "downlinking" images back to Earth.
The Americans have got relay satellites in space, so they can get the imagery down as soon as it's taken. To a lesser extent, Russia and China are constrained So are the Europeans and Israelis, because without suitable relay satellites, they have to download the imagery as they come over a 'friendly' station. Since the early days, and the end of the Cold War, technology has advanced to such a degree that we are being watched — for good or for bad — almost constantly by military, commercial and non-governmental bodies.
That includes satellites monitoring urban and rural development, agriculture, climate change, road traffic, or people smuggling. Buildings went up. Seeing all of this completely changes our concept of the planet as being static. And instead of just having a figure about how much a country has been deforested, people can now be motivated by pictures that show the deforestation taking place. Today Planet has more than satellites in orbit, with about it calls Doves that can image every bit of land every day when conditions are right.
Planet has ground stations as far away as Iceland and Antarctica. Its clients are just as varied. The company works with the Amazon Conservation Association to track deforestation in Peru. It has provided images to Amnesty International that document attacks on Rohingya villages by security forces in Myanmar. And when USA Today and other publications wanted an aerial image of the Shayrat air base in Syria before and after it was bombed by the U.
Those are pro bono clients. Its paying customers include Orbital Insight, a Silicon Valley—based geo-spatial analytics firm that interprets data from satellite imagery. With such visuals, Orbital Insight can track the development of road or building construction in South America, the expansion of illegal palm oil plantations in Africa, and crop yields in Asia.
For example, it conducts poverty surveys in Mexico for the World Bank, using building heights and car densities as proxies for economic well-being.
An insurance company wanting to track flood damage to homes in the Midwest. A researcher in Norway seeking evidence of glaciers eroding. But what about … a dictator wishing to hunt down a roving dissident army?
The other significant constraint is technological. Resolution-wise, the current state of the art of one foot is supplied by another satellite imaging company, DigitalGlobe. Still, Planet has blazed a trail. Others someday will follow it. When they do, how will they harness the power to see so much of the globe, every single day? Will their aims be as benevolent as those of Planet?
And in any event, he added, an American firm seeking to accomplish that would encounter considerable federal regulatory hurdles. Of course, regulations can be changed. So can the boundaries of our technological limits. Just a year or two ago, the owner of the largest number of functioning satellites in orbit was the U. Now Planet prevails over the heavens in greater numbers than the most powerful nation on Earth.
On a bracing autumn evening in San Francisco, I returned to Planet to see the world through its all-encompassing lens. I zigzagged among semicircles of techies gathered raptly around monitors. Everywhere I looked, the world came into view. I saw the Port of Singapore teem with shipping activity. I saw the croplands of southern Alberta, Canada, in a state of flagging health. I saw an entire network of new roads in war-wracked Aleppo, Syria—and for that matter, a new obstruction in one of those roads, possibly a crater from a bomb attack.
A tall young man named John Goolgasian wanted to show me how his less than year-old Virginia-based outfit called GeoSpark Analytics was matching crime data with Planet images.
After a few clicks, we were staring at neighborhoods in Nigeria that had been overtaken by the extremist group Boko Haram. A few more clicks and the image was even more familiar: my neighborhood in Washington, D. Andy Wild, the chief revenue officer, spoke of the new frontier in a slightly quavering voice. I was pondering the implications of this when a young woman showed me what was on her laptop. So it had asked Planet to provide satellite imagery of homes in Plano, Texas.
Neligh shrugged and offered a thin smile. Now her client had the truth. What would it do with this information? Conduct a surprise raid on the somnolent hamlets of Plano? Jack up premiums? Order images that might show construction crews installing new Jacuzzis and Spanish tile roofs? The future is here, and in it, truth is more than a kindly educator. It is a weapon—against timber poachers and burglars and mad bombers and acts of God, but also against the lesser angels of our nature.
People lie, you know. The age of transparency is upon us. As I walked back to my hotel, I thought about the two moped riders in Islington, as I often had in the months since I surveilled them. I wondered if they had been arrested. I wondered if they were guilty of anything at all, apart from the crime of being conspicuously interesting on an otherwise dull morning. I wondered if they would ever know that unseen strangers had been watching them, just as a stranger might now be watching me—someone somewhere squinting into a CCTV monitor at the spectacle of a lone figure walking fast on a dark and otherwise vacant street on a chilly night without a coat on, as if in flight from something.
All rights reserved. This story appears in the February issue of National Geographic magazine. Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. His previous feature , about young technology entrepreneurs in Africa, ran in the December issue. Share Tweet Email.
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