Presentation: June 2014

This month's AE presenter: Jeff
Date of presentation: 16-June-2014
Subject: The Great War Gallery
Description: Jeff put together a picture show of sorts illustrating the state of military aviation during "the Great War" (World War I).  Since aviation in general was still in its infancy at the time, a wide range of wildly divergent aircraft was used, ranging from lighter-than-air craft used for observation and, well, spying (with a high mortality rate for the observers, given the wicker baskets and flaky parachutes) to huge biplane bombers that took 23 minutes to climb to 5,000'.

Most of the information and images were taken from an article in Smithsonian Air and Space Magazine about the book "The Great War: A Photographic Narrative" by Mark Holborn and Hilary Roberts (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 10/29/2013).

Download PDF file of this presentation (9.1 MB)

Aerospace Minute by David

On 2 June, David talked about competition in the market of commercial satellite imagery. Digital Globe currently sells images with a resolution of 50 cm, or about 20 inches. Airbus is selling images with better resolution. They have petitioned for permission to sell images with better resolution and are launching a satellite in August capable of images with 31 cm , or 12 inch resolution. Another challenge for Digital Globe is Skybox. Skybox is a startup that plans to launch 24 low cost, low resolution satellites in low orbit, each satellite about the size of a dorm room refrigerator. Through the use of scale out compute clusters and technologies such as Hadoop Map-Reduce, they are able to create high resolution images by stacking multiple low resolution images. This is a similar technique to stacking photos for astro-photography. It is rumored that Google is eyeing skybox for purchase, we could soon have Google Satellites.