Message posted by Peter Merlin on August 13, 2014 at 20:37:02 PST:
I was at Vandenberg AFB this morning for the launch of DigitalGlobe's WorldView-3 satellite, which promises to provide higher resolution commercial imagery than has previous been available to non-government customers. In 2013, DigitalGlobe successfully petitioned the Commerce Department to relax resolution limits that had been previously set at 0.5-meter for any customer without a government waiver. This past June the company announced it would soon offer imagery from WorldView-3 capable of resolving objects as small as 31 centimeters (12 inches) from an altitude of 383 miles above Earth’s surface. Subsequently, DigitalGlobe revealed that six months after WorldView-3 becomes operational, the company will be permitted to sell panchromatic (black & white) imagery with a resolution as fine as 25 centimeters (9 inches), as well as 1-meter multispectral and 3-meter short-wave infrared imagery. Neal Anderson, vice president of technology at DigitalGlobe, described WorldView-3’s capabilities. "Imagine you're in San Francisco," he said. "With the capabilities of this satellite we could see home plate in Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Not only can we see home plate, we can see the players in the field. And if we knew which teams were playing and what color uniforms they were using, we could tell you which team is in the field and which team is batting. We could even count empty seats. And if the stadium scoreboard was big enough, we could tell you the score."
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