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9 Earth-Imaging Start-ups to Watch
A tech boom will shake up commercial satellite imaging

Words like “provocative,” “disruptive,” and “game-changing” are rarely applied to the staid world of satellite imaging. But that’s exactly the kind of talk the industry is generating, with the successful launches of more than two dozen Earth-imaging satellites in the last few months and the planned launches of yet more by year’s end.

Those spacecraft are being lofted not by traditional aerospace players but by venture-capital-funded start-ups. What’s more, the satellites cost an order of magnitude less than traditional spacecraft, and in many cases they’ll be networked in large constellations capable of revisiting sites far more frequently than what’s now possible. So even though their per-pixel resolution won’t compete with satellites from market leader DigitalGlobe, they’ll be able to provide much fresher data—in some cases, revisiting sites up to several times a day—at a much cheaper price.

The press has made much of start-up Skybox Imaging’s projected ability to count all the cars in every Walmart parking lot in America on Black Friday. And a reporter at Mashable recently suggested that start-up Planet Labs’ CubeSat constellation, had it been operational, could have spotted missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 within hours. But there are many other uses for these tiny spacecraft, including assessing storm damage to verify insurance claims, monitoring crop health to predict seasonal yields, and mapping human rights abuses like the bombing of civilian areas.

Industry experts seem to agree that those applications are just the starting point. “It’s like the iPhone,” says Peter Wegner, director of advanced concepts at the Space Dynamics Laboratory. “You never knew you needed a device with a GPS and an accelerometer, but once you’ve got the capability at your fingertips, you suddenly realize all the things you can do.”

Edasi jutt lingil:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/satellites/9-earthimaging-startups-to-watch