Satellite Pictures - Google, Government and Haiti

Satellites are cold war stuff. There are many commercial and non-commercial satellites up there now. And satellites are in orbits that are impractical to change because of limited propellant.

PAPADOC:

Quote: æThese pictures were obviously taken from US Government satellites. If they can do this, why can't I? " As others have pointed out - it is not "obvious" as a matter of fact you cannot obtain images taken from US Government satellites other than those declassified and released through public channels.

Also as other have pointed out, there is a myriad of commercial sources for these images. I believe that you left out one word in the statement quoted above - FREE. Sorry about that.

You should also know that there are US Government regulations and international accords which control the quality of images released to the public. These are defined by size of an object that can be resolved in the image; e.g., 0.5 meter means that the image cannot resolve an object that is less than 0.5 meters in any dimension.

Military and intelligence imaging are capable of much greater resolution. Much speculation about this but actual capability is highly classified.

The quality of ultra-high-resolution US Government satellite imagery can also be artificially degraded prior to public release, and often is.

Those who speculate about the resolving power of US Government satellite optics often cite physical limits imposed on the resolution by the aperture size of the optics used. What they fail to consider is that these satellites use highly advanced techniques such as optical aperture-synthesis to construct effective apertures much larger than even the satellite itself. The resulting resolution of these images and the detail that can be seen in them would absolutely astonish you.

This technique is routinely used with radar (and is much easier to do, I might add) to create highly-detailed radar ground imagery. Various Venus probes used radar aperture synthesis, for instance, to create high-resolution images of the planet's surface. Imaging the planet's surface is impossible to do using optical techniques because of Venus' extremely dense cloud cover.

Maybe it is obvious to some that these were US govt satellite photos, but as Mike K points out (and as was captioned in the news broadcast I saw), these were from a private company Geoeye.