![]() ![]() Here is an example of GEO satellite data: View of the New Zealand’s Southern Alps, complete with gleaming snow cover, on Nov. They are most often used for weather monitoring and are considered very-low spatial resolution satellites. Current spatial resolution for GEO EO satellites makes it hard to distinguish anything smaller than a city. However, it also means they are too far up to capture detailed, close-up imagery of Earth. Since they keep a relative position to the Earth’s surface, they can simply transfer down their data as they capture it since they don’t move out of range of the reception dish. To reach that orbital path, they need to be very high up. GEO satellites are geo-stationary, which means they orbit at the same speed as the Earth’s rotation, thus appear to always be above the same point on Earth. How many satellites are watching us right now?Įarth observation satellites are separated between geosynchronous equatorial orbits (GEO) and low Earth orbits (LEO). Let’s dig into the reasons why live, real-time satellite data video feeds, as portrayed by Hollywood, do not currently exist. This means we can expect times between scene capture and high resolution data transferred to the customer to eventually drop from days to mere minutes. New entrants are getting into the ‘ground game’, the fall in computing costs is pushing space data to the cloud, and companies like SkyWatch are working hard to automate access to satellite data. Today, the commercial space sector is booming. In the past, weeks could pass between capture and final delivery. ![]() Captured data is stored on the satellite until it reaches a ‘downlink station’, where it will be decoded, sent to the data provider, further processed, and sent to its final destination. Satellites capture hundreds of terabytes of data everyday. It’s also important to note satellites do not capture data at all times. This means not all satellites are always within range of a downlink station. There are only a limited number of Earth observation (EO) satellites capturing data over the globe. However, in most cases, for high resolution imagery, it takes a few days. In best case scenarios, it could take only a few minutes between data capture and data delivery. As with most high quality feeds, limitations on data refresh come from transfer speeds and processing speeds. ![]()
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