An astronaut's eye view

Depending on the wavelength, a 40mm telescope-camera at 300 miles
altitude will have a resolution of about fifteen feet per pixel, and on
an HD tv will cover an area about three miles across, when looking
straight down. The circle of its horizon will be about 1500 miles
across. The resolution will drop by half near the horizon but the area
will more than double. To cover the entire area visible to the
satellite would take over a thousand such cameras.
A cluster of say fifty sat-cams on a single platform could be
controlled induvidually by operators using a joy stick or a VR headset
and paying perhaps two or three dollars a minute, or a point on the
earth could tracked, selected by a pointer or GPS coordinates. The
time a position could be tracked before it dissappeared over the
horizon could be as long as five minutes.
The appearance of a place on earth can vary by season, time of day,
angle of observation and cloud cover. Real time reception of a very
low power signal could be possible with a tracking dish that would cost
within the hundred dollar range, but would only work when the satellite
is above the horizon. If used at only two percent of capacity it could
still generate more than a million dollars a year. The service could
also have subscribers who want to see past over flights, or views of
other parts of the world. Advertising might also become a source of
revenue.
The entire assembly, including stabilizers, satcams and broadcast
elements might weigh less than a hundred pounds and cost less than a
million to build and launch. If successful, a constellation of
satellites could offer 24/7 coverage of the earth's enchanting,
changeing, beauty.
It would certainly offer a more dramatic view of our home planet than
keyhole or the other services presently provided. It would give the
earthbound the chance to see the world as the astronaut sees it.

On some PBS show I saw short clip of Mt. Fugi peeking from the clouds,
from an angle of maybe 45, it was awesome. Actually, since the imager
might be five meg, it would make a fine CD chock-ablock-full of
pictures of the whole region where you live, or any place else, with
dramatic aspects, to reiterate, added by the angle of the sun, the
angle of the picture, the direction it is taken from, cloud cover and
shadows. The question isn't whether I want to be a virtual space
cadet, but whether there is a virtual space cadet market out there. I
like to think that once the images can be downloaded for a small fee it
will appeal to the inner space cadet that most people don't yet know
they have. Getting an overview of a terrain you are going to hike or
bike might become as important as bringing the GPS reciever along.
Wouldn't it be neat if when a satcam was passing within range they
would PBS would put it on their schedule real time. You might see a
cloud that you recognize from your backyard.
As far as cost, it is just moving electrons. With a million
subscribers for the image retreival service, five dollars a year would
pay for the system many times over, and the available image archive
might quickly fill up the equivalent of the library of congress. By
combining information from thousands of images, it might be a popular
video game like pastime to fly over any place in the 'real' world as if
in a plane, swooping and turning at speeds and g forces that would be
impossible, or illegal, in a real plane.
Just trolling for a reply.

wrote:

Wouldn't it be neat if when a satcam was passing within range they
would PBS would put it on their schedule real time. You might see a
cloud that you recognize from your backyard.



Al Gore wanted to do that, the congress said it was a boondoggle, and
canceled the satellite.

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote:
wrote:

Wouldn't it be neat if when a satcam was passing within range they
would PBS would put it on their schedule real time. You might see a
cloud that you recognize from your backyard.



Al Gore wanted to do that, the congress said it was a boondoggle, and
canceled the satellite.

Pat

I remember reading about it, but IIRC Gore's idea was to put the
satellite in geosycronous orbit and include the whole hemisphere. I
guess the idea was to remind us that we live on spaceship earth.
Weather satellites suffice to give the same view.
The technology of ccd imagers has advanced tremendously, perhaps to
the point where a light weight orbiting cluster of low power telescope
cameras, that take multiple views and can be controlled by paying
customers, could be profitable. As video wall paper goes, it would be
the creme de la creme.
There might be four markets in decending order of cost. Real time
control for a few dollars a minute, monitering of popular views for a
few dollars a month, an archive of millions of views for a few cents
per image and free views sponsored by advertising.
It would fulfill the original proposals purpose and then some, it
might even generate a return on investment. So far only communications
and 'keyhole' type imageing has been embraced by business, this
proposal would take earth watching to the level of art.

On 6 Jun 2005 22:37:45 -0700, in a place far, far away,
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:



Pat Flannery wrote:
wrote:

Wouldn't it be neat if when a satcam was passing within range they
would PBS would put it on their schedule real time. You might see a
cloud that you recognize from your backyard.



Al Gore wanted to do that, the congress said it was a boondoggle, and
canceled the satellite.

Pat

I remember reading about it, but IIRC Gore's idea was to put the
satellite in geosycronous orbit and include the whole hemisphere.

No, he wanted to put it at a Lagrange point.

wrote:

I remember reading about it, but IIRC Gore's idea was to put the
satellite in geosycronous orbit and include the whole hemisphere. I
guess the idea was to remind us that we live on spaceship earth.
Weather satellites suffice to give the same view.



A live visible spectra optical view would be nice as well as a lowlight
view at night showing the cities and lightning storms.

Pat

In article .com,
wrote:
I remember reading about it, but IIRC Gore's idea was to put the
satellite in geosycronous orbit and include the whole hemisphere...

Close but not quite: he wanted to put it at the Sun-Earth L1 point, so it
would always be seeing the *sunlit* hemisphere.

The technology of ccd imagers has advanced tremendously, perhaps to
the point where a light weight orbiting cluster of low power telescope
cameras, that take multiple views and can be controlled by paying
customers, could be profitable.

Unless it has relatively low resolution, the "shutter control" people in
places like the Pentagon and Israel will have conniptions about any such
proposal, and getting a launch license for it may be difficult.

The US military, in particular, really likes the idea that when planning
operations against minor nations like Iraq, it doesn't have to worry about
hiding what it's doing from overhead reconnaissance. The days of this
immunity are numbered, but they'll push to keep it as long as they can.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |

Pat Flannery wrote:
wrote:

I remember reading about it, but IIRC Gore's idea was to put the
satellite in geosycronous orbit and include the whole hemisphere. I
guess the idea was to remind us that we live on spaceship earth.
Weather satellites suffice to give the same view.



A live visible spectra optical view would be nice as well as a lowlight
view at night showing the cities and lightning storms.

Pat

Both are excellent ideas, wish I had thought of them, but it never
occured to me. I used to hate the landsat pictures untill I learned
something about the different information various frequencies carried.
It would be the rare connosoir who prefers false color, but they would
be one of the biggest segments of the market, the ones willing to spend
the most.
The resolution of an apeture can be sacrificed to light gathering
ability. While night vision takes it a notch further, I don't know how
appealing the monochromatic image would be. It would be really neat to
make out local street lights, or even to shine a flashlight up and see
it on your monitor.

On 2005-06-07, Pat Flannery wrote:

Al Gore wanted to do that, the congress said it was a boondoggle, and
canceled the satellite.

Cancelled but not before completion. As I understand it, the satellite
was built and tested out; it's now sitting in a clean room on the
grounds that it's still nominally a live project and there's no sense in
throwing out a working satellite.

However, no funding has been allocated, or is likely to get allocated;
the Shuttle launch rate was capped pre-Columbia, making ISS a priority,
and no spare launch was available to carry Triana, though it got
manifested a few times and then dropped. (I've seen a manifest where it
was planned to fly on STS-107, in fact)

I doubt it'll ever fly in the current form, but it's possible it may end
up being cannibalised or reused in the same way the Mars 2001 lander
became Mars Phoenix.

--
-Andrew Gray

Rand Simberg wrote:
On 6 Jun 2005 22:37:45 -0700, in a place far, far away,
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:



Pat Flannery wrote:
wrote:

Wouldn't it be neat if when a satcam was passing within range they
would PBS would put it on their schedule real time. You might see a
cloud that you recognize from your backyard.



Al Gore wanted to do that, the congress said it was a boondoggle, and
canceled the satellite.

Pat

I remember reading about it, but IIRC Gore's idea was to put the
satellite in geosycronous orbit and include the whole hemisphere.

No, he wanted to put it at a Lagrange point.


Same difference. In any case it would be a whole earth camera which
would inspire a whole lot of boredom.
In LEO, cameras could capture the always changeing majesty of...well
just about anyplace on the face of the earth.
I am especially interested in your opinion of the idea Mr. Simburg.
Do you think that a million dollars is an underestimate of the cost?
Do you think it would be marketable in the catagories listed?
Other business ventures like materials processing have failed to show
promise. Even a constellation of dozens of observer satellites would
weigh less than a ton, so it wouldn't put much of a dent in the
commertial launch business. It would, if popular, inspire a greater
appreciation for space. There is something about seeing your local
landscape as part of a larger sphere that will inspire awe, maybe even
'neat'!
Last but not least, it might be the single greatest influence to
inspire orbital tourism. There might even be a market for high end
surround screens for those who want to experience the next best thing,
and leave them longing for the real experience of seeing it while
weightless. It would be a bragging 'rite' for some one whose been
there done that to say so upon talking to someone enchanted by just the
out of this world view. Get the launch costs down and this might be
the catalyst that makes tourists breed like rabbits. Maybe that should
have been 'breeds tourists like rabbits', but honeymoons, or second
honeymoons, would be a big segment of the business. Now there's a
bragging right, born in America (or...) but conceived in space. Who
will be the first?