I've emailed the BNSC to obtain the correct contact details for the TopSat team. Will see what comes back.
Cheers Andy >-----Original Message----- >From: talk-boun...@openstreetmap.org [mailto:talk- >boun...@openstreetmap.org] On Behalf Of Peter Miller >Sent: 18 May 2009 9:29 AM >To: Matt Amos >Cc: Talk Openstreetmap >Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Satellite for OSM > > >On 18 May 2009, at 01:38, Matt Amos wrote: > >> On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 11:32 PM, MP <singular...@gmail.com> wrote: >>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopSat >>>> >http://www.qinetiq.com/home/defence/defence_solutions/space/topsat.html >>>> >>>> Apparently you can rent it for £25k a week... easily within the >>>> ambition of >>>> donate.openstreetmap.org. >>> >>> How large part of earth could be imaged in that timeframe? >>> Topsat have 2.5m resolution, which is quite fine for most areas, >>> though less than aerial imagery ... >> >> 2.5m sounds about the same as Y!, so its even enough for rudimentary >> building mapping. but thats the black-and-white figure, the colour >> resolution is about 5m. :-) >> >> out of interest, is there a link to the £25k figure? i couldn't find >> any pricing information on the net anywhere... > >Sound great, but in the mean time we can of course buy commercial >photography including the right to derive mapping at a cost of about >$17 per sq km which is affordable for compact European cities but not >for large rain-forests! The Gaza strip cost £4,500 and photography for >the Birmingham conurbation would be about £5,000. A small UK town >would be <£5000. The West Midlands are looking for sponsors at present. >http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Aerial_photography_funding_appeals > > > >Regards, > > > >Peter > > > >> >> >> i guess hiring it for any fixed period is a bit hit-and-miss, since >> satellite imagery will be affected much more by cloud conditions. >> >>>> MP's point about what you do with the vast quantities of data >>>> that you get >>>> is well-observed, of course. But we like a challenge. >>> >>> One thing is having the data on ground - entire world (510,072,000 >>> km²) from Topsat in 2.5m resolution will have ~ 245Tb of uncompressed >>> data (you'll get to about 1/3 of that if you discard imagery with >>> just >>> sea), which is lot, but perhaps still manageable. >> >> at 5m in colour, thats about 20.4 Tb for the land portions of the >> world. compressing in JPEG, which compresses about 2:1 based on their >> sample images, thats 10.2 Tb - or 1,400 gmail accounts ;-) >> >> or it would cost $20,110 to put it into S3 and host for a year >> (without downloading) >> >> or about £1,400 to stick it on some 1Tb SATA drives in a RAID1+0... >> >> (interesting co-incidence which implies that each gmail account at >> capacity costs google about £1 in storage...) >> >>> But you have to >>> either store some non-trivial part of it on the satellite (that is >>> not >>> as easy as on earth where you can buy some server with RAID and plug >>> it into wall) while the satellite does not have direct visibility of >>> the earth contyrol center where it can relay stored images (and then >>> you have some means to transmit large amount of the data while the >>> satellite flies over the earth control center) or have multiple >>> ground >>> stations or bunch of another satellites that relay the continuously >>> transmitted data. >> >> i have to assume that qinetiq have some way of solving this. >> >> also, would it be worth it as a PR stunt for qinetiq to just use up >> whatever spare capacity they have when maneuvering or between clients >> and give us whatever gets photographed...? anyone know anyone at >> qinetiq? >> >> cheers, >> >> matt >> >> _______________________________________________ >> talk mailing list >> talk@openstreetmap.org >> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk > > >_______________________________________________ >talk mailing list >talk@openstreetmap.org >http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
