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.