SATELLITE PHOTOGRAPHY
"All the Earth, all the time, live and in color": That's the pitch for a new infotainment company called AstroVision, based in Alexandria, Virginia, which has announced plans to place a webcam in geosynchronous orbit 22,000 miles above Earth. Unlike weather satellites, which usually provide one black-and-white image every 15 minutes, AstroVision (www.astrovis.com) will deliver a live, nearly continuous, true-color, super-hi-res feed of natural events such as volcanic eruptions, snowstorms, hurricanes, tornadoes, and large forest fires. Night promises to yield even more drama than day, with views of lightning borne on the tops of clouds and multikiloton-level air bursts from meteorites burning up in the stratosphere. "There is always something dramatic happening somewhere on the globe," says company founder and chief technical officer Malcolm LeCompte. "In space exploration, a pretty picture is far more than a pretty picture. It's loaded with information."
LeCompte started pitching his idea 10 years ago, leaving behind an academic career at Harvard studying the atmospheric chemistry of other planets. In July, he raised $5 million in first-round funding by convincing investors that the same people who consistently put the Weather Channel's Web site in Media Metrix's top 50 would also watch an Earthcam. The satellite itself is fairly simple, a suite of four high-definition CCD cameras - one wide-field and three targetable narrow-field units - coupled with a 320-Mbps, 8-GHz X-band downlink that will produce one frame every four seconds. Putting the satellite into orbit, however, will cost about $50 million, necessitating a second round of funding this fall.
If all goes as planned, the first bird will be aloft by the fall of 2002, and global coverage from a ring of five AVStar satellites will commence by mid-2004. LeCompte hopes the effort will not only be profitable but also increase the public's environmental awareness. "We'll be able to see what's going on in the rain forest, both the burning and the scars in full color," says LeCompte. "When people see the brown earth against the green of the forest canopy, 'slash-and-burn' will take on a whole new meaning."
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