The video above was taken by a satellite, from space. It has enough resolution to watch individual cars move down the road and identify specific planes at the Beijing airport.
The footage is from Skybox Imaging, a company that has just started offering customers 90-second video of any point on Earth from its SkySat-1 satellite, upping the ability to monitor what’s going on down here on Earth from space. In this clip, the SkyBox video sits on top of a static layer of satellite imagery and is overlain by a map layer from Mapbox, based on OpenStreetMap. The combination makes it super easy to see precisely where the planes and cars are headed. Based on the exact time the video was taken, a plane that has just landed could be identified using public flight logs.
“What’s exciting now is being able to put the video directly on a map,” said Mapbox CEO Eric Gunderson. “They’re an awesome data source, and we have an awesome API that can digest that data.”
It’s easy to imagine all sorts of uses for satellite video like monitoring container ships or spotting active illegal deforestation (more ideas in the video below). The movement video gives you could also improve the map layer by revealing which direction cars are traveling.
SkySat-1, which the company claims is the smallest satellite capable of sub-meter resolution imagery, is just the first of a fleet of 24 tiny satellites Skybox has planned. The satellite sent back the first HD video from space in December, and the company has just started to offer video to customers.
Another company, Planet Labs, has just finished launching its own fleet of 28 imaging microsatellites from the International Space Station and hopes to offer scientists and the public the chance to track changes on the Earth’s surface with much higher frequency than ever before.