New Satellite Images for Sale

New Satellite Images I G w a I Satellite remote sensing began as a tool of the Cold War. With the mutual desire to monitor and target each other, the United States and the Soviet Union designed remote sensing satellites that would overfly each other’s national airspace and acquire high-resolution images (less than 5 meters GSD) of each other’s territory.’ Developed in the 1950sand deployed in the 1960s,U.S. and Soviet spy satellites quickly became a unique classified source of militarily useful information. As satellite imaging for the U.S. and Soviet classified domains advanced during the 1970s and 1980s, satellite remote sensing slowly began to emerge in another arena-the commercial market. The emergence of a commercial market began with NASA’s deployment of Landsat-1 in 1972and Landsat-2 in 1975.These two satellitescarried multispectral sensors that acquired low-resolution images (80 meter GSD) of the earth’s surface. Given that these sensors could not generally detect objects smaller than a football field, the images were principally used by academic institutions, multinational companies, and national governments for large-scale civil applications such as environmental monitoring and resource management. During the 1980s, the U.S. and French governments constructed and deployed more advanced remote sensing satellites for the commercial market. The primary U.S. contribution consisted of Landsat-4 (1982) and Landsat-5 (1984); each carried multispectral sensors that acquired more detailed images (30 meter GSD) of the earths surface. France launched SPOT-1 in 1986 and Vipin Gupta is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Security and Technology Studies, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he specializes in satellite remote sensing and arms control. The author would like to thank the staff at Autometrics, Earthwatch, Lockheed Missile and Space, Orbital Imaging, and Space Imaging for providing technical details on their remote sensing satellites.The author would also like to thank Paul Brown, Paul Chrzanowski, Kent Johnson, Karen Kimball, Michael May, Kristie Monica, Peter Moulthrop, Steve Sackett, Mike Schwab, Susannah Skyer,and two anonymous reviewers for their help. This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract No. W-7405-Eng-48. The views expressed are those of the author alone. 1. Like Georges Seurat’s pointillist paintings, a digital image consists of many square dots or ”pixels.” For this article, a high-resolution image is defined as a digital picture where the length and width of each pixel represents a ground distance of less than five meters. The ground extent of the pixel is expressed in terms of GSD-ground sample distance (in meters). Images captured on film are described at an equivalent GSD. See Peter Zimmerman, “A New Resource for Arms Control,” New Scientist, Vol. 123,No. 1683(September23,1989),p. 40; M.R.B. Forshaw, A. Haskell, P.F. Miller, D.J. Stanley, and J.R.G. Townshend, “Spatial Resolution of Remotely Sensed Imagery: A Review Paper,” International Journal of Remote Sensing, Vol. 4, No. 3 (1983),pp. 497-520. Znternational Security, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Summer 1995), pp. 94-125 0 1995 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 94 New Satellite Images for Sale 1 95 SPOT-2 in 1990, placing a 20-meter GSD multispectral sensor and a 10-meter GSD panchromatic sensor on each satellite.’ These four satellites became the principal source of imagery for civil applications as well as a new source of information for surveillanceand defense mapping. Commercialsatellite remote sensing is now expanding into a new area that encroaches on the classified domain-high-resolution imagery. Examples are shown in Figures 1 and 2. While such images were once controlled solely by the U.S. and Soviet governments, the end of the Cold War effectively removed the superpowers’ rationale for keeping high-resolution satellite imaging to themselves. The subsequent decline in defense budgets has also created economic incentives within private industry and government in Russia and the United States to sell high-resolution satellite imagery for profit to the many states, institutions, and individuals who have been denied accessto this source of information. Remote sensing companies that...