Way up there – and personal

Scare stories over negative uses of Earth imagery may dominate, but benefits range from disaster relief to zooming in on Aretha's hat
Satellite photo of National Mall in Washington, DC, during inauguration of US President Barack Obama
Mass appeal ... One of GeoEye's breathtaking images of President Obama's inauguration. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The inauguration of Barack Obama last week was a gigantic event – but was captured in its entirety, and in good enough detail that you could nearly make out Aretha Franklin's hat, by GeoEye-1, a commercial imaging satellite orbiting the Earth 684km (425 miles) up. The pictures, which are now on display on the site, show objects as small as 50cm long – less than an arm's length.

The photos of the huge numbers attending the Obama inauguration are breathtaking. It is fortunate that they are there: a software problem meant GeoEye-1, which went into orbit last October, didn't go into commercial service until December.

In November, the terrorist attacks in Mumbai – and how they were planned – shocked the world. Detailed satellite images of the city on Google Earth, sourced from GeoEye's sister satellite Ikonos, were used. It is a clear example of how easy such intelligence has become to obtain.

Satellites of love

That's because satellite photos are a keen new source of commercial competition for a huge range of services. DigitalGlobe is a competitor to GeoEye, supplying 60cm-resolution images to companies such as Google Earth, but much of its funding comes from the US government. Its WorldView-1 satellite will rush out the latest classified terrain images of Afghanistan to American ground troops, or shots of an Australian city centre for a satellite navigation map, in a single day's orbit.

Jill Smith, chief executive of DigitalGlobe, says: "Our satellite constellation has the capacity to collect 1m square kilometres of images of the Earth per day." However, the US government restricts what is publicly available. "Someone could utilise it for unlawful purposes, but we believe the benefits of access to this imagery far outweigh any potential risk," says Smith.

GeoEye-1 cost $502m (£357m) to put into service, and shoots at a resolution of 41cm, but the US government restricts the commercial output to a maximum of 50cm. When the next-generation GeoEye-2 satellite launches in 2011 it will take pictures at 25cm resolution, but the same restriction will apply. Subscribers to the service will be able to see individual people, but not their faces.

Tim Brown, an analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, has published numerous reports using commercial satellite imagery to detect forced labour camps and missile bases in North Korea. He says: "There are many cases of commercial imagery falling into the wrong hands. China tried to buy sub-metre-scale images of Taiwan but ran into trouble with US government regulations. By going through a supposedly benign environmental monitoring project, they got 60cm-resolution images of the entire island from DigitalGlobe."

Brown says not everyone is able to circumvent the security checks. "North Korean agents tried to purchase imagery of the DMZ [demilitarised zone] a couple of years ago through a dummy company based in Australia, but were caught. There's a guy in a cubicle somewhere checking all this," he says. Nonetheless, in 2006 the Islamic army in Iraq circulated an instructional video showing how to use Google Earth to zoom in on buildings such as Iraq's Rasheed airport.

Smith at DigitalGlobe says: "Most people don't realise this but the images on Google Earth are usually a few years old, they are very low resolution and the GPS co-ordinates are often imprecise. It's a world apart from the bespoke solutions we sell to our more sophisticated clients."

The CIA launched the first Corona spy satellite in 1959. It was stocked with black-and-white film with an image resolution of 7.5m – enough to make out cars and buildings, but not people. By the late 60s the resolution of the spy satellites had gone up to 46cm and by the 80s, 15cm. Reports vary on their current capabilities. In the mid-90s the US government changed its laws on commercial satellite-imaging, and the market has since grown briskly.

Seven privately run satellites have been launched in a decade, with a further 30 planned for the next 10 years. Business intelligence customers are predominately multinationals in the mining, oil and gas, and insurance sectors. However, the satellite launches have been funded mainly by US and European taxpayers. Our governments have purchased a cheaper intelligence solution and simultaneously brought into being a market for Earth imagery expected to grow to $3bn by 2017.

All of the commercial satellite operators are signed up to a UN charter requiring them to supply images to aid disaster-relief efforts. In reality this represents a tiny proportion of their capacity. Mark Brender, vice-president of marketing at GeoEye, says: "The agreement is for between two to three scenes for NGOs every year. Outside of that, commercial entities take precedence." He adds: "I will happily sell you hi-res pictures of North Korea's missile bases today for $10 per square kilometre." Off-the-shelf images are becoming cheaper and even free via online services. But obtaining timely coverage of a particular site at high resolution requires "tasking" a satellite so the camera points in a particular direction over the desired land area. It costs tens of thousands of dollars.

Access all areas

Brown at GlobalSecurity says: "Motor manufacturers such as Ford cover up their new products to protect against rival companies obtaining imagery. I assume commercial satellite espionage takes place, although you would have to task the satellite for the correct place and time. But it's increasingly easy to get access."

Lars Bromley, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, produced a series of highly publicised reports on humanitarian crises in Africa using satellite imagery. He uses the images to assess damage to buildings and the movement of refugees. He says commercial interests often prevent aid organisations from getting timely information.

"For years, I could not task a particular satellite over Darfur as some other entity had dominated it by paying millions of dollars," he says. "A couple of weeks ago I managed to get images within 72 hours. Competition has obviously subsided."

Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) is a British company planning to launch a 60cm-resolution satellite in 2011 at the low price of $50m. "The image-cost will be 15p per square kilometre," says Paul Brooks, SSTL's business development director. "Timely, precise images will be available for combating deforestation, drought prediction and resource management. It'll bring transparency benefits to the global economy."

SSTL's lightweight satellites are helping to fuel a boom in countries that have not previously had their own national imaging capability, with 199 Earth-observation satellite launches planned between now and 2016. NigeriaSat-1 was launched by SSTL in 2003 with a 32-metre resolution. "The first images of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina were from NigeriaSat," says Brooks. "It was the satellite that was overhead at the time."

Both the British Red Cross and Oxfam say the importance of satellite imaging will grow as the number of extreme events increase over the coming years. Today, such organisations still face problems getting the pictures they need to respond effectively. New satellite launches will hopefully build to a critical mass where the right imagery is easier to obtain and more affordable.

"Every technology comes with negatives as well as positives," says GeoEye's Brender. "A telephone can be used to co-ordinate a robbery, or to call an ambulance." In the current market for high-resolution satellite imagery, a bit of both is occurring.

Eye spy: a timeline

1959: Corona
The CIA launches the first spy satellite with 7.5m resolution. Black-and-white film is returned to Earth in "photo buckets".

1961: Zenit
The Soviet Union launches its own spy satellite with a 10m resolution camera, although unofficial sources claimed it was much better.

1966: KH-7
The US breaches the metre scale with its 46cm resolution spy satellite.

1988: IRS-1
A India launches its own colour CCD imaging satellite with a resolution of 36.5m.

1999: Ikonos
US launches the first commercial-imaging satellite at 1m digital resolution. Orders delayed from 2001 due to the war in Afghanistan.

2003: NigeriaSat
Nigeria's contribution to the Disaster Monitoring Constellation goes live at 32m resolution.

2008: GeoEye-1
The highest-resolution commercial satellite to date, GeoEye-1 can record images down to 41cm. Publicly available images are restricted to 50cm.

Sources: NRO, Euroconsult

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