![]() MODIS (NASA’s satellite constellation which images the earth every 1-2 days)ĭata from all three of these satellite constellations can be downloaded for free from either Earth on AWS or Google’s Earth Engine Catalog.Landsat 8 (the USGS’s satellite which images the earth once every 16 days).Sentinel-2 (the European Space Agency’s constellation of satellites imaging the entire landmass of the earth once every five days).Here’s where things get interesting-we’ve written previously about the explosion of freely available, openly licensed, and constantly updating satellite imagery in our blog post, An Introduction to Satellite Imagery and Machine Learning. For larger-area basemaps, satellite imagery providers make more sense: and Australia and has a very simple user interface available through any web browser. For high-resolution aerial imagery, NearMap orthographics provide great coverage in the U.S. Rather than license imagery from Google that they’re, in turn, licensing from imagery providers, it usually makes more sense to go directly to the source. ![]() Google’s Maps API is notoriously stingy in this regard, with its terms of service even limiting your right to display content derived from Google imagery on a map that isn’t also provided by Google. tracing building footprints or other cartographic features), you should consider a paid option that allows for derivative works to be produced. If you’re considering deriving a commercial product from the imagery you’re browsing (e.g. Many Chinese imaging companies, for example, will not sell any satellite pictures of China, North Korea, Taiwan, or Tibet.Some other great sources of non-commercial, non-downloadable imagery are: These are far from comprehensive, and some images are withheld from public access for national security reasons, a process known as shutter control. While the entire surface of the planet gets photographed multiple times a day at low resolution, the sharpest images from the latest commercial satellites can still cost upwards of $3,000, according to a price list at Apollo Imaging, a satellite imagery aggregator. Since our providers often focus on cities and places that are more heavily populated, these regions tend to get updated imagery more frequently.” The satellite images on Google Maps cover only about one-fifth of Earth’s surface-but 98% of its population. High-resolution Planet images of parts of The Line do seem to be available for licensing, although none have surfaced publicly on Google Maps to date.Ī Google spokesperson told MIT Technology Review: “We are constantly updating satellite imagery as it becomes available from our imagery providers. We tend to concentrate first on those areas that exhibit the most change (e.g., cities, etc.) but will fill in those other areas of the globe as well.” ![]() Stephen Wood, senior director of Maxar’s news bureau, told MIT Technology Review: “We do not have any recent high-resolution imagery that has been collected over these areas.” He wrote that the company primarily focuses on its customers’ areas of interest but “when we have available imaging time, we will collect other areas as part of our overall mission to continually update the entire globe with high-resolution imagery. “My immediate reaction is that no one bothered with high resolution because it’s in the middle of a desert and high-resolution imagery is incredibly expensive to own and distribute.” “I’ve not heard of any commercial company trying to restrict things,” says Doug Specht, a geography lecturer at the University of Westminster in London. “Probably the simplest solution is that a money interest is purchasing those images at the highest level, where they maintain an exclusive right to them.” “If there’s no Maxar images acquired over an area that is experiencing rapid economic investment, something fishy is going on,” Van Den Hoek says. ![]() One of the main commercial uses for satellite imagery is to help companies understand how their rivals or entire countries are faring in the global marketplace-to see, for example, “how many cranes are active on the Manhattan skyline right now, or oil tankers are in port,” says Jamon Van Den Hoek, a geography professor and director of the Conflict Ecology Lab at Oregon State University. ![]()
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