German Radar Satellite Lifts Off Tonight 65
2Y9D57 writes "Germany's new TanDEM-X radar satellite is scheduled to lift off from Baikonur Cosmodrome at 04:15 Berlin time on 21 June — that's 10:14 pm Eastern today (20 June). Flying in close formation with its twin satellite, TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X will generate the most consistent and highest-resolution digital elevation map ever of the Earth — 12m = 40ft. pixel pitch. It will take three years to image all 150 million square kilometers (58 million square miles), in the process generating more than 350 TB of raw data. Here's where to go as the time approaches for live streaming."
Re:Another proprietary dataset? (Score:4, Informative)
40ft / pixel resolution is not tha high resolution (Score:3, Informative)
Re:His mama is so fat... (Score:4, Informative)
that she can be identified on a 40 ft resolution height map.
Re:ah, the logic of it (Score:1, Informative)
Um, because there's a difference between a PHOTO and an ELEVATION MAP? This isn't actually gonna show a picture, after all. All it's gonna show is "this point is 20 m above sea level, this point is 40 m above sea level".
You're insane if you're comparing this to Google Street View.
Re:what about Google? (Score:3, Informative)
No idea what other advantages radar has
It works through cloud cover and at night.
Re:Another proprietary dataset? (Score:3, Informative)
The German Aerospace Center deal with the scientific utilization.
and paying a license fee
data sets will be provided under COFUR (Cost Of Fulfilling User Request) conditions
12m resolution? Pffft. (Score:1, Informative)
TanDEM-X will generate the most consistent and highest-resolution digital elevation map ever of the Earth — 12m = 40ft. pixel pitch.
The US had ten times better than that [fas.org] twenty years ago.
Re:what about Google? (Score:1, Informative)
also ignores some plant life, giving a picture of the actual ground.
Re:Another proprietary dataset? (Score:4, Informative)
data sets will be provided under COFUR (Cost Of Fulfilling User Request) conditions
You can't just show up with a bunch of hard drives and ask for the data, even if you're
prepared to pay for costs that would produce.
ESA (and ESA-related, TerraSAR is German-only) projects have a long and annoying history
of keeping their data under wraps despite public funding and no objections by the scientific
parties (priorities of potential discoveries matter) involved.
Until this changes, it's still SRTM [wikipedia.org] data for everyone.
In the USA: yes, in Germany: no (Score:3, Informative)
In the USA, all government works [wikipedia.org] are in the public domain, which leads to NASA [wikimedia.org] images and others being usable by the public and due to the copyright status, also by Wikipedia.
In Germany, a different concept was chosen. The general idea is that mostly private corporation want to use works by the government, e.g. publishers of books, maps, etc. In order to give a bit of the money spend on the works back to the taxpayer, everyone who wants to use those images has to pay royalties. This results in slightly less costs for the taxpayer, which is exactly the goal of that concept.
However, this approach is no longer viable. In the digital age, everyone is a potential user of works by the government, including works like maps and satellite images. NGOs like Wikimedia Deutschland [wikimedia.de] (the German chapter of Wikimedia and supporter of the Wikipedia project) are lobbying to free those images. But the laws are, as usual, at least 10 years behind the technological and sociotechnical development.