Why space matters: Imaging satellite operations, part 17—The Green Hills of Earth

Green—a word associated with jungles, a description of newbies, in songs sung by muppets about the difficulties of being it, and songs sung by fictional spacefarers about the qualities of their homeworld. Those spacefarers might be fictional, but for certain real space imagery operators, green describes a capability of a satellite payload. Green is one […]

Why space matters: Imaging satellite operations, part 16—“Blue are the streets, And all the trees are too”

Who could forget 1999’s most famous dance single? But does anyone remember the song’s group?? Enough dancing—time to talk about satellite operations until we’re blue in the face (sorry, couldn’t resist). As mentioned in the previous lesson, this lesson is about DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-2 satellite and the blue spectrum of its imagery payload. Mainly, what is […]

Why space matters: Imaging satellite operations, part 15—decrypting the world with waves of color

Finally, we get to discuss the colors used for DigitalGlobe’s imagery satellites—or satellite, as we will be focusing (no pun intended—these satellites can’t really focus, remember) on WorldView-2. According to DigitalGlobe’s Basic Imagery literature, WorldView-2’s image sensors use eight different colors to look at the Earth: Coastal, Blue, Green, Yellow, Red, Red Edge, Near-IR (InfraRed)1, […]

Why space matters: Imaging satellite operations, part 14—making it intelligible

I know—I promised to talk about the different colors on imagery birds (satellites) and in what applications in particular they’re used. But, someone pointed out to me that perhaps the past few lessons have been a little too space-nerd-tastic and maybe a little too difficult to understand. SO let me just try to make things […]

Why space matters: Imaging satellite operations, part 13—sweeping the Earth’s surface with pixels

Imagery satellites have come a long way since the Corona/Discovery program. Nowadays, there is so much more an imagery bird can deliver—and that’s what DigitalGlobe is giving to its customers. Before going on, I just want to clarify my reasons, again, for covering DigitalGlobe in this series. Primarily, they make it easy to find things. […]