A British spacecraft is now routinely making movies of the Earth’s surface.
Carbonite-2 was built by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) in Guildford and launched in January.
It is the forerunner of a network of spacecraft that will be sent up in the years ahead to be operated by Earth-i, an analytics firm also of Guildford.
Carbonite’s short clips are the first high-definition, full-colour videos to be delivered from orbit by a commercial satellite on a regular basis.
The sequences have a resolution of one metre, which means the movement of cars, lorries, boats and planes is easily discerned.
To mark the end of the satellite’s commissioning phase, SSTL has released a number of videos that have been prepared with Earth-i.
These include views of Dubai Airport, Buenos Aires, Puerto Antofagasta, Rio de Janeiro, Diego Garcia and Mumbai Airport.
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Andrew Cawthorne, the director of Earth observation at SSTL, told BBC News: “We’ve made now coming up to 500 videos. We have an automated chain, which we had to fine-tune during commissioning, but now the files come down off the spacecraft and pop out a few minutes later.
“The way this satellite works is that it has to point at a target and hold its gaze, even though it’s flying overhead at several km per second. The longest video we’ve made so far is 60 seconds, and I think the accuracy of the pointing speaks for itself.”
Earth observation has long made use
Article source: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43775440
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