To understand how profoundly satellite data affects the daily lives of Earth's inhabitants, Christopher Simpson looks no further than The Weather Channel.
The communications professor at American University knows that weather reports play well in the country�s farmlands, but he also realizes that this information, "determines whether you carry an umbrella to work." And this is only the beginning of how data about the Earth and its atmosphere can shape the way people behave, said Simpson.
Historically, satellite images of weapons plants and launch sites have kept superpowers at bay. In the future, this data could be used by human-rights groups to uncover instances of ethnic cleansing in war zones like Bosnia. Likewise, journalists could use satellite data to see into areas where they have been prohibited from setting foot. This potential use excites Simpson and drives him in his current endeavor, teaching a course entitled "Satellite Imagery and Human Rights."
The class, offered through the School of Communication at American, is being offered both online and on campus as a nontechnical introduction to the practical uses of satellite imagery. It's designed for journalists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and even for local, provincial, and tribal leaders and resource managers.
"My interests are in getting scientists in whatever field to communicate to the public in ways that empower it," explained Simpson, director of satellite imagery and the news media project at American. "In the case of [satellite imagery], it is very powerful."
Aerial sensors on board the satellites capture the images, which are then processed by specialized high-end software programs that interpret the data for a graphical user interface. Users can then see the data as images with markers that the software inserts.
If interpreted correctly, these images can put a user in the middle of a situation without having to be there. The key is interpretation, and this is part of what Simpson hopes to show students. For example, a journalist studying an image of Bosnia would need to know to look for certain markers to determine whether and where ethnic cleansing is taking place. These markers include abandoned towns, indicated by fields that lie unplanted or unharvested, or large amounts of earth that have been moved around by bulldozers. By spotting these markers, an inspector or reporter can focus on an area, then ask that it be investigated by foot.
As a journalist, Simpson covered issues regarding national security. He saw the potential for satellite images in reporting as soon as countries such as Russia and India made their data available. "The imaging industry has its own culture and way of doing business and so does the journalism industry," explained Simpson, who sees his project as the perfect go-between for those who could benefit from access to satellite data and those who have the data to offer.
Simpson�s course also comes at an unprecedented time in the evolution of satellite technology. Later this year, Space Imaging plans to launch its Ikonos-1 satellite, a craft that promises to bring viewers images that may allow them to spot the movements of large groups of people and the conditions of fields. Exactly what it will allow folks to see is part of what John Pike is trying to find out. Pike, a security analyst with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), is experimenting with a number of satellite images as part of his organization�s project Public Eye.
"There�s a lot you can get now that 10 years ago was difficult to get and 25 years ago was impossible to get," said Pike.
State-of-the-art images now allow people like Pike to spot buildings. For Pike, who spends a lot of time examining photos of nuclear-test sites, studying the buildings is enough to determine whether a country is developing nuclear weapons.
Preparing an image for perusal is not for the faint of heart, despite all the technological advances. Pike cackles when he thinks about what it takes to process images from his latest experiment -� to identify roads, vehicles, and possibly large crowds in an image of Kosovo. "It ain�t easy," he laughed.
Just retrieving the image takes considerable effort. A customer could go to firms such as Space Imaging to choose from a variety of images at different resolutions, but the sorting and searching alone cost money, and then one still has to pay for the image itself. Then one has to download it. For his experiment, Pike has an image of Kosovo that is a quarter of a gigabyte in size, in a nonstandard version of a proprietary format. The length of time needed to open the file? Nearly two days.
"This is work. I mean, it�s not something that happens instantly," Pike noted.
To get to this level of availability, Pike has US$5,000 worth of software running on an $8,000 workstation. "It's going to take Moore's Law another year to two to solve [this] problem," Pike said.
Even once these desktop-computing issues are solved, there's still the problem of the frequency of images of a certain area. For example, to determine whether a weapons site has fired a missile, Pike said he'd need to have several images of the same area over a period of time. Unfortunately, much of what is publicly available -- from sources such as the Russian government via Microsoft's Terra Server database -- is spotty. "There are two random images of Pakistan, but none of them are of nuclear sites," Pike explained.
It�s hard to get images of what you�re looking for at the exact times you�d need them to be captured. "What I�m worried about is that I�ve got bits and pieces of Kosovo, but I can't get anything current. I know what Kosovo looked like one month ago," Pike said.
Nevertheless, the availability of images through sources such as J-Track and elsewhere is enough to give Simpson's students a taste of what the technology can do for organizations like the FAS and for journalists. In many ways, Pike and Simpson see the coming shift in the availability of satellite imagery mirroring the changes that took place when the Internet evolved from technologies like gopher to the Web. "It�s going to just rip away the curtain and help people learn what�s going on," explained Pike.
To what degree observers will learn about a country�s activities has yet to be determined, though. "Will we be able to find prison labor camps in China? Yes. But is it going to find forced abortions? Some types of questions won�t be answered," Pike said.
