This month Google Maps celebrates its ninth anniversary, and in June so does the company’s 3-D mapping app, Google Earth. It is the latest in a series of spacecraft designed to beam back high-resolution pictures of our planet, images that most of us will eventually see on Google Maps or Google Earth. Spinning around the planet some 600 kilometres (370 miles) above us, it will cover every part of the Earth’s surface every couple of days.īall Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado is building WorldView-3 for commercial satellite operator DigitalGlobe. Once in orbit later this year, WorldView-3 will be one of the most powerful Earth observation satellites ever sent into space by a private company. Got a question about today’s news? Ask the Explainer.Įxplainer thanks Stefan Geens of Ogle Earth, Kate Hurowitz of Google, and Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog.Behind a long rectangular window, in a high white room tended by ghostly figures in masks and hats, a new satellite is taking shape. Google says that it takes a variety of factors into consideration when it decides which images to use on Google Earth-sometimes it will choose an older, low-res photo rather than a newer, doctored one in other cases, the usefulness of a high-resolution image outweighs the fact that it has a blurry spot. For example, when the Geological Survey wanted to fly over Washington, D.C., to take photos in 2005, it had to promise the Secret Service that it would delete or edit anything that might “jeopardize national security.” Most of the very high-resolution images on Google Earth are actually aerial photos, not satellite photos that means they’ve been taken from within a nation’s airspace and are therefore subject to that nation’s rules and regulations. Such instances occur because governments can, in certain cases, exert control over Google’s third-party image providers. Or Soesterberg Air Base and Huis Ten Bosch Palace in the Netherlands, which are represented by choppy pixels. Some locations seen on Google Earth, however, do appear to have been altered: See, for example, the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., home of the vice president, where everything within the road encircling the Observatory is blurrier than everything surrounding it. (She denied reports that Google had agreed to distort images of certain Indian locations in 2007 but acknowledges that the company did have conversations with government officials.) A Google spokeswoman told the Explainer that this is the only image alteration the company has made due to a governmental request. In response, Google replaced its satellite shots of Basra with an earlier set of photos, taken before the war began. But it has fielded requests to do so in the past-as in 2007, for example, when British troops discovered that insurgents in Basra had been printing out detailed Google Earth images of U.K. Google doesn’t automatically exclude photos of locations that might represent a security risk, such as nuclear facilities or the homes of political VIPs. The attackers targeted public areas whose locations were already available on printed maps, but can a government ask Google to exclude images of more sensitive areas from Google Earth? The 10 gunmen who terrorized Mumbai last week used Google Earth to plot their attacks, according to statements made by the sole captured terrorist.
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