An App That Promises To Help Get You Out of Parking Tickets

As reported by The Atlantic Cities: David Hegarty insists that parking regulations are not what they seem, if you believe they dictate indisputable prohibitions: No parking during Monday morning street cleaning. No parking after 6 p.m. without a residential parking permit. Two-hour parking only during stadium events.

Chances are, the law actually says much more than that, with room for error and interpretation. In reality, you cannot park on the street during Monday morning street cleaning, assuming that your car is within 100 feet of a mandated sign informing you of said street cleaning, assuming that sign isn't blocked by an overgrown oak, assuming the ticket recorded your VIN correctly, assuming the officer who gave it to you was right that it was, in fact, Monday morning.

"What I always tell people is that the parking regulations aren’t black-and-white," says Hegarty, the co-creator of a shrewd new app that aims to help users wrangle out of parking tickets (seemingly unjust parking tickets, that is). "There’s not like a manual in City Hall that says 'these are the parking violations.' Ordinances get passed, statutes get passed." Regulations pile up on top of each other. They come down from the city and the state. "It’s actually ferociously complicated. Each ordinance has 30 to 40 lines of fine print, written in non-clear legalese."

The app – simply called Fixed – navigates all that fine print for you, with the help of legal researchers (mostly law students on contract). It's so far in beta in San Francisco with fewer than 1,000 users. Hegarty and co-creators David Sanghera and DJ Burdick are hoping to have it in the iPhone app store by the end of the month, where it will gradually become available to a wait list of some 25,000 San Franciscans. From there, Fixed is angling to move to other cities, where the idea at its core – leveraging technology to lower the burden of accessing laws and interacting with government – will test public agencies that field these appeals.

Cities, after all, love this kind of innovation when it helps small businesses to apply for a permit, or neighbors to plan a block party. But when it helps drivers outsmart their parking citations?

The app works like this: Users snap a photo of their parking ticket. Based on the type of citation (street cleaning, expired meter, etc.), the app responds with several suggested errors commonly associated with the violation. Was the street cleaning sign visible? Did the parking officer record your VIN number correctly? Was the meter broken? Based on the answers, the app prompts users to collect additional photographic evidence from the scene. Then it compiles a letter contesting the citation. Users digitally sign the document, and Fixed (snail)mails it to the city on their behalf.

The appeals process in San Francisco can have up to three rounds, all of which Fixed can handle for you, save the last-ditch confrontation in court if users are still unhappy with the decision (Hegarty hasn't figured out yet if that step requires a licensed attorney). Fixed handles all of the correspondence. The app only charges users if it successfully contests a citation, taking 25 percent of the original fine.

According to the city's own data, San Francisco issued about 1.5 million parking citations last year. About 5 percent of them were contested, and 34 percent of those were thrown out. Hegarty figures that's the low end for the app's success rate, given that it will use more in-depth research on parking regulations than most people marshal on their own.

For now, Fixed largely relies on human eyes to assess the tickets. But the more citations Fixed processes, the better it will become at automatically triaging them and handicapping the errors common to each citation type. Eventually, Hegarty hopes the app will be able to predict the errors and citation types most common to individual streets.

Already, the app flags contested tickets into four categories of protest. There are factual errors – maybe the officer misinterpreted the day on the sign. There are legal errors, perhaps when a car is parked more than 100 feet from an applicable sign. There are procedural errors (maybe the officer wrote you a ticket before the street cleaner came through instead of afterward). And then there are what Hegarty calls "appeals to fairness." He got a ticket once for having no residential parking permit, despite the fact that he had demonstrably applied for one two months earlier.

No matter how sophisticated the app becomes, it will always require local contractors in new cities to pour through parking regulations. 

"It’s not as much work as you'd think it is," Hegarty says. "We've found that a legal researcher with about 20 hours of work can cover the top 10 citations for a city, which account for about 95 percent of tickets."

Fixed also wants to make that legal research open-source, so that any determined private citizen can contribute to it. In that way, the app may tap into a deeper angst over parking tickets – not simply that most of us hate to pay them, but that in many places they've come to feel like a municipal racket.

"The city has been treating parking funds as a revenue source, and we don’t think that’s right," Hegarty says. "Parking fines are meant to be a deterrent so people don’t do adverse behavior that effects everyone. The reason people feel so unfairly treated by them is that they become a revenue source for the city, that they jack up the price of them every year."

He insists that the app isn't meant to be adversarial to City Hall, although it could clearly drive up the case load of municipal employees who field contested tickets. It's tough to argue, though, that the public shouldn't get to leverage the fine print in city regulations with the same ease that bureaucrats can.

Obama Rolls Out Plan For Better Truck MPG

As reported by USA Today: President Obama announced on Tuesday that his administration will begin developing the next phase of tighter fuel efficiency standards for medium and heavy-duty vehicles.

The announcement, which Obama made at a distribution center for the grocery chain Safeway in Upper Marlboro, Md., follows his State of the Union pledge last month to set new fuel standards for trucks "so we can keep driving down oil and imports and what we pay at the pump."

The president ordered the Environmental Protection Agency and Transportation Department's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to develop and issue new fuel-efficiency and greenhouse gas standards by March 31, 2016.

"The goal we are setting is ambitious," Obama said of his plans to set new fuel standards. "But these are areas where ambition has worked out really well for us so far."

Although heavy-duty vehicles account for just 4% of registered vehicles on the road in the USA, they account for approximately 25% of road-fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions coming from the transportation sector.

From a previous round of bolstering fuel standards, which were finalized by the Obama administration in 2011, the White House projects the country will save about 530 million barrels of oil — more than what is imported annually from Saudi Arabia — and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 270 million metric tons.

The president also previously issued new standards that double fuel efficiency in light vehicles and trucks by 2025. The light-vehicle standards are eventually projected to reduce fuel consumption by 2.2 million barrels per day.

Obama's 2011 directive on heavy-duty vehicles impacted new models from 2014 to 2018. According to those standards, manufacturers of big rigs and semi trucks were required to achieve a 20% reduction in fuel consumption and greenhouse emissions, heavy-duty pickup trucks and vans were required to achieve a 15% reduction, and delivery trucks, buses and garbage trucks were required to achieve a 10% reduction. The administration touts the first round standards will save vehicle owners and operators $50 billion in fuel costs.

In the administration's past push for bolstering fuel efficiency standards for passenger and heavy-duty vehicles, manufacturers had expressed some resistance to Washington dictating costly improvements. But as the administration has made reducing fuel consumption a top priority, the manufacturers have sought to have a greater voice in shaping the rules.

"Every time someone says you can't grow the economy, while bringing down pollution, it turns out they've been wrong," Obama said. "Anybody who says we can't compete when it comes to clean energy technologies -- like solar and wind -- they've had to eat those words."

The administration is offering tax credits to manufacturers of heavy-duty alternative fuel vehicles as well as to companies that are building infrastructure, so vehicles that running on alternative fuels have places to fill up.

The Heavy Duty Fuel Efficiency Leadership Group, an alliance of trucking companies, said in a statement that as Obama considers the next phase of fuel standards "it is important to ensure flexibility and provide incentives as key attributes of any regulations going forward" to their industry as well.

Obama also is calling for Congress to end subsidies to oil and gas companies and create an Energy Security Trust Fund to fund research and development for advanced vehicle technologies.

The White House picked the Safeway distribution center because the grocery chain —which has participated in an EPA-led initiative — has made big strides improving the efficiency of its trucking fleet.

Obama took a moment at the beginning of his remarks to mention his "soft spot" for the grocery chain, recalling how his grandmother would send him to his local Safeway in Hawaii.

The president also praised Safeway for being an early leader on the issue of fuel efficiency by improving the aerodynamics of its trucks, investing in larger trailers and more efficient tires in its fleet.

New Project Aims To Offer Free Global WiFi Service From Outer Space

As reported by RedOrbit: A project being incubated by the Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF) has ambitious plans to beam WiFi to everyone on the planet for free.

The organizations says that it is planning a project called “Outernet,” which will utilize a satellite constellation to make Internet universally-accessible and for no cost.

Outernet says on its site that there are more computing devices in the world than people, but only 60 percent of the world has access to the Internet.

“The price of smartphones and tablets is dropping year after year, but the price of data in many parts of the world continues to be unaffordable for the majority of global citizens. In some places, such as rural areas and remote regions, cell towers and Internet cables simply don’t exist,” Outernet says on its site. “The primary objective of the Outernet is to bridge the global information divide.”

The organization says that giving access to the knowledge the Internet has to offer is a human right, so it is guaranteeing this right by taking a practical approach to information delivery. The plan is to transmit a signal to mobile devices, antennae and satellite dishes, allowing people to access basic levels of new, information, education and entertainment.

Essentially the beginning of the project will see to it that these devices will be able to access some of this basic information for free. Eventually, Outernet says it will be providing two-way Internet access for free, meaning not only will it be allowing everyone to download this useful data, but they will be able to use this global WiFi service to upload things as well.

Outernet will consist of hundreds of low-cost, miniature satellites in Low Earth Orbit, each of which will be receiving data streams from a network of ground stations. These satellites will be transmitting the data in a continuous loop until new content is received.

The organization said that its entire constellation will be using globally-accepted standards-based protocols like DVB, Digital Radio Mondiale, and UDP-based WiFi multicasting.

“Citizens from all over the world, through SMS and feature-phone apps, participate in building the information priority list,” the organization wrote. “Users of Outernet’s website also make suggestions for content to broadcast; lack of an Internet connection should not prevent anyone from learning about current events, trending topics, and innovative ideas.”

In June, the organization plans to develop prototype satellites and test out a long range of WiFi multicasting. A few months later Outernet will begin transmission testing in flight-like environments. The launch and testing of constellation operations is expected to begin by next January.

Outernet is asking for contributions to the project of any size, which will all be 100 percent tax-deductible.

Big Data - Watson Computers for Healthcare And Self-Driving Vehicles: Signs Of Things To Come

As reported by Betakit: for one welcome our new computer overlords.” Ken Jennings was humble in accepting his  Jeopardy defeat to the silicon of Watson. While not the theme of the recent Wavefronts Wireless Summit 2014, it’s a fair subtext.

Now that connected cows and connected home appliances are no longer the stuff of bad internet jokes, the relationships between mobile devices and everyday things seems to be catching on. Forecasting of 50 billion things being connected to the internet by 2020 equates to sizeable opportunity. Over 500 people in attendance (double of last year) at the summit indicates a growing interest in this business.

The healthcare industry stands to benefit from much of this innovation. More importantly it’s the patient who stands to gain the most. Jeffrey Betts leads IBM’s Chronic Disease Management and Personalized Healthcare activities in Canada, and presented, “Converting Big Data into Better Healthcare with Analytics.”

We spoke about the opportunities that Watson is presenting to healthcare professionals. It’s an an artificially intelligent computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language. “Watson holds the promise of providing a physician with all of the evidence, all of the time at the point of care,” said Betts. In spite of their 8-12 years of training and education, keeping current with information is a huge challenge. As he points out “the cold hard fact is velocity of change in health information far exceeds any humans cognitive capacity to absorb it. So physicians are obsolete at graduation and fall behind in their knowledge continuously.”

Technology like Watson is giving physicians the ability to draw on the latest evidence. This comprehensive collection of evidence makes a significant difference in the work they do diagnosing a patient, and in selecting a treatment.

Text is the key driver of healthcare communications, yet so much important context is lost. Bett’s points out “about 80% of medical information is done in the form of free text. It’s being able to actually utilize this to find facts about the patient that are not explicitly captured in some other system of record, like if they might be a smoker or not can impact the prognosis or treatment plan.”

Watson can both read and reason, and thus establish context. It has the ability to infer and understand the nuances of language. From the medical perspective Watson has the ability to place relevant facts that it finds in unstructured text, into context for the physician.

For instance, Betts shared that “in talking with Oncologists about their process for creating a treatment plan, there’s a lot of ambiguity and complexity. It’s takes time. It’s a very iterative process. By having all of the evidence relevant to the patient presented with options ranked in probability, plus the evidence associated with those options means added physician confidence is just a click away.”

With the Watson API it will be interesting to see what new innovation entrepreneurs will deliver. This is technology that can be key in breaking down of our current health system silos. The patient will finally become the center of care.

But that wasn't all that grabbed attention at the Wavefronts Wireless Summit.

Tim Hayden is author of the forthcoming “The Mobile Commerce Revolution” and announced to the crowd that “we’re at the end of the auto age”. Social is mobile, he said, and it’s changing our relationship to “being” mobile.

Hayden offered that “if you look at what’s happening with Lyft for instance, it’s like virtual mobile hitchhiking. It’s getting simpler to get a car only when you need it, and paying for it only when you use it. To a younger and more urban demographic the car is becoming a utility. It’s not the status symbol of past generations. As Hayden says, “everyone born after 1994 has a very different outlook on life. They’re not going to have a car define who they are.”

Michigan, California, Nevada and Florida now allow self-driving vehicle research to take place on their highways. There’s been the recent news of driving coast to coast without a drop of gas courtesy of Tesla. Transportation is in the early days of massive upheaval.

Hayden notes “it’s interesting that Uber pre-orders 2000 self driving cars two days after receiving it’s $258 million investment from Google Ventures. Here’s good old fashion ‘peanut butter and jelly’. You have the service and you have the OEM talking with each other about how to make this extremely efficient. Not paying drivers, a lower infrastructure cost per vehicle, not worrying about driver errors, changes the game.”

Jay Giraud is cofounder and CEO of Vanoucer’s Moj.io, which is connecting the car to the internet. He believes personal transportation is “about turning your car into a platform. It can now act and behave like a smartphone. We’re envisioning new models of ownership, new ways of commuting, new ways of connecting with people while you’re on the road, and getting the things you need in a very contextual and automated way.”

While he’d love a self-driving car, Giraud knows the reality of mass adoption is still on the distant horizon. What he’s see right now is the fact that “we all do the same commute, but we all have different needs. How we use our cars, how connect with cars, how we find cars, get in cars, and maybe even how we own cars is up for grabs right now.”

Regardless of technology, the devices and how they’re connected, none will solve our global challenges. Only people can solve people challenges like carbon emissions and personal wellness. Ideally technology will be the enabler to a better future.

Celebrating 25 Years of Not Getting Lost Thanks to GPS

As reported by Wired: If there was ever a justification needed for space technology, it’s that it keeps people like me from constantly being lost. These days, my smart phone is much better than me at getting around thanks to a fleet of satellites that tells it where it is at all times.

Though not a particularly romantic anniversary, today marks 25 years since the first satellite in the U.S. Global Positioning System launched from Cape Canaveral, beginning the set up for one of the wonders of the modern world. In the two and a half decades since then, GPS has become inextricably embedded into just about everything we own, finding use in cartography, smart phone apps, geotagging and geocaching, disaster relief, and hundreds of other applications, while simultaneously raising privacy concerns.

GPS relies on at least 24 satellites flying 20,000 kilometers overhead in one of six different orbital paths, tracing out what looks like a toy model of an atom. With their solar panels extended, each of these 1-ton satellites is about the same size as a giraffe. At any given moment, each satellite beams out a signal identifying itself and giving its time and location.

A model showing the 24 original GPS satellites
in orbit and a point on the Earth rotating.

Your GPS-enabled phone or car captures that signal and compares the time it was received to the time it was transmitted. A quick calculation involving the speed of light allows the device to figure out the distance to that satellite. If you have your distance to two or three satellites, you can triangulate your position on the Earth. When all the GPS satellites are working, a user always has at least four in view, allowing them to determine things like altitude, speed, and direction.

In order to properly triangulate, GPS requires extremely accurate timekeeping, which is why each satellite carries an atomic clock. The satellites are also some of the most important technology using lessons learned from Einstein, who taught us that clocks outside a gravitational well will run faster than those inside of it because of the warping of space-time. An opposite effect comes from the fact that GPS satellites move at 14,000 kilometers per hour (0.001 percent the speed of light), meaning that they experience a slight time dilation making their clocks run slow relative to one at rest on the ground. The two effects taken together mean that the clock on a GPS satellite runs about 38 microseconds faster each day than ones here on Earth. GPS requires accuracy of 20 to 30 nanoseconds (one microsecond is 1,000 nanoseconds), so both effects are part of the calculation determining how far away each satellite is at any given time.

The idea behind GPS comes from the very beginnings of the Space Race. In 1957, the Soviet’s newly launched Sputnik satellite emitted a characteristic radio beep that could be tuned in to as the object passed overhead. While the rest of the U.S. was freaking out, two scientists at the Applied Physics Laboratory realized they could use those transmissions to pinpoint where the satellite was. As Sputnik approached, its radio signals would get compressed a little, shortening their wavelength, and as it receded, the wavelengths would lengthen. This is known as the Doppler effect and can easily be heard as an ambulance speeds toward you, the pitch of its siren getting higher.

The APL scientists used UNIVAC, one of the first commercial computers in the U.S., to figure out Sputnik’s orbit. A year later, they were asked to do the opposite problem: Find out where someone was on Earth based on the location of an overhead satellite. This was soon taken up by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (later named DARPA, the agency responsible for developing the internet), which launched satellites starting in 1964 as part of the TRANSIT program, the first satellite navigation program. The U.S. Navy was the main user of the TRANSIT satellites, using them to provide location information for their missile submarines.

Developing, launching, and maintaining the satellites necessary for a full GPS system was horrendously expensive (eventually costing roughly $8 billion in today’s dollars). If it hadn’t been for the Cold War and the fact that the U.S. needed to launch nuclear missiles from anywhere and everywhere, GPS might never have happened. The paranoid U.S. military wanted to make sure they would be able to respond to a Soviet nuclear attack even if some of its nuclear arsenal was destroyed. It wasn’t enough to have aircraft bombers and land-based intercontinental ballistic missile launchers. Submarine-launched ballistic missiles were needed to provide a counterattack from the sea. (The Soviets, of course, had similarly spread-out countermeasures.)

But submarines needed to accurately know their position before launching a missile in order to hit their target. The Navy had TRANSIT for this. Working in parallel throughout the 1960s, the Air Force developed a similar concept called MOSAIC for their bombers and the Army launched satellites under the SECOR program that could determine the location of a unit somewhere on the globe.

By 1973, the branches of the U.S. military realized they could combine their ideas and come up with something superior to all three. In September of that year, the top brass met at the Pentagon and came up with what would eventually become known as the Navigation System Using Timing and Ranging program, called Navstar-GPS, which was later shortened to just GPS. Between 1978 and 1985, the military launched 11 satellites (10 of which worked) to test the new GPS system.

An unlaunched GPS unit, which looks like probably the most satellitey satellite ever. Image: Scott Ehardt

After Korean Air Lines flight 007 was shot down in 1983 for wandering into prohibited U.S.S.R. airspace, President Reagan promised that GPS would be opened up for civilian use on passenger aircraft once it was completed. The first GPS satellite in the modern fleet launched on Feb. 14, 1989. The Air Force had planned to use the space shuttle for this launch in 1986 but was delayed by the Challenger disaster and eventually used a Delta II rocket. The full GPS fleet was completed in 1994 and now at least 32 satellites are in orbit to provide redundancy. During the same time, the Russians developed and launched GLONASS, which works on principles similar to GPS, and is currently the only alternative location-finding system in the world.

At its beginning, the U.S. military feared that GPS technology would be used by enemies, and purposely degraded civilian information so that it could only provide accurate location information to within 100 meters. In 2000, President Clinton had this feature turned off and now civilian devices are usually accurate to within 5 to 10 meters. The European Union and China are currently building their own global navigation systems, known as Galileo and Beidou, respectively, that will serve as further alternatives to GPS in the coming decade. It seems likely that folks in the future will never have to worry about being lost again.

Revamping An Old Technology To Jam The GPS Jammers

As reported by Naked Security: Every day, GPS navigation systems are at work around the globe, guiding and tracking lorries, trucks, mobile phones, passenger vehicles, aerospace vessels and more, in spite of whatever the weather throws at them, as long as they're in line of sight with at least four satellites.

But while they're ubiquitous, GPS devices are also fragile.

That's because they run on feeble signals that can be spoofed and thrown off course by stronger signals (it's been demonstrated with an $80 million yacht and a drone).

Beyond spoofing, GPS can be swamped entirely by stronger signals coming from (illegal) GPS jammers - low-power, pocket-sized devices that drown out signals going to GPS receivers.


Such jammable GPS signals include those that power mobile phones, text messages, GPS systems, and WiFi networks.

You can pick up such jammers cheap on the internet, where they're sold under premises such as helping to silence the clamor that plagues noisy classrooms, theaters, restaurants, or business meetings.

They're also used by commercial drivers who don't want their employers tracking their every move, domestic violence victims who don't want to be found, and criminals who use jammers to intercept valuable cargo loads or commit other crimes.

A recent example: US authorities arrested what they said was a gang of high-tech burglars who allegedly cut telephone lines to disable alarms and used cellular telephone signal jamming devices to stop the back-up alarms from notifying the alarm companies’ central stations.

Beyond enabling crooks, jamming can have dangerous consequences.

In August 2013, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed a $32K penalty for using a GPS jamming device.

Michele Ellison, Chief of the FCC's Enforcement Bureau, cites the potential consequences of GPS jamming and the FCC's motives behind jacking up punishment for using jammers:

While people who use jammers may think they are only silencing disruptive conversations or disabling unwanted GPS capabilities, they could also be preventing a scared teenager from calling 9-1-1, an elderly person from placing an urgent call to a doctor, or a rescue team from homing in on the location of a severely injured person. The price for one person's moment of peace or privacy could be the safety and well-being of others.

Beyond fines and warnings, communications experts have been seeking technological improvements in GPS that could overcome jammers.

Within the past year, the UK has been ramping up one such technology.

It's called eLORAN - short for enhanced LOng-RAnge Navigation - and it enables navigation by triangulating via low-frequency/longwave radio signals transmitted by fixed land-based radio beacons.

LORAN has been around for a while, having first been used in military operations in World War II, but the growing popularity of GPS pushed LORAN out in the 1990s.

The "enhanced" part of eLORAN comes from more recent improvements in the technology, including increased accuracy of traditional LORAN, achieved via advances in receiver design and transmission characteristics.

One such improvement is the ability of eLORAN receivers to now use signals from all stations in range, up to 40 stations.

Dana Goward, president and executive director of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation (RNT) Foundation, which supports adoption of eLoran, told InsideGNSS that the eLORAN signal is about 1.3 million times more powerful than the GPS signal - far too brawny a signal to be tripped up by GPS jammers.
On top of that, the signals can, unlike GPS, reach underground, under water, and into buildings, InsideGNSS reports.

Here's how it's described by David Last, a British expert on positioning, navigation and timing systems (PNT), as quoted by InsideGNSS:

I draw the analogy by saying that Loran in its original form, which a lot of people remember, came from the days of black and white television. What we’ve got here [with eLoran] is still television, it’s still Loran — but it’s digital. It’s high-definition. It’s color. It’s big screen. It’s all of those things.

On top of that, eLORAN signals are seen as an excellent backup to GPS signals, being impervious not only to whatever a jammer throws at them but also to asteroids.

The Telegraph reports that the UK is pioneering the use of eLORAN for navigation.

The UK has, actually, been building eLORAN infrastructure since at least 2007, when the UK Department for Transport, via the General Lighthouse Authorities, awarded a 15-year contract to provide a state-of-the-art eLORAN service to improve the safety of mariners in the UK and Western Europe.

More recently, the General Lighthouse Authorities last year became the first in the world to deploy eLORAN to help counter the threat of GPS jamming for shipping companies operating both passenger and cargo services along the south and east coasts.

The technology is expected to be up and running and foiling GPS jammers by this summer.

Meanwhile, the US is following suit.

According to GPS World, President Barack Obama last month signed the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) for 2014 - an act that shows "an acute awareness" of the vulnerability of space systems to navigational disruption, it reports.

It sounds like the US is gearing up to protect national security, space systems and more with the unjammable technology. 

Inside The Google Earth Satellite Factory

Google Earth has given us a new way of looking at our cities and
neighborhoods - from space.

As reported by BBC: Behind a long rectangular window, in a high white room tended by ghostly figures in masks and hats, a new satellite is taking shape. Once in orbit later this year, WorldView-3 will be one of the most powerful Earth observation satellites ever sent into space by a private company. Spinning around the planet some 600 kilometers (370 miles) above us, it will cover every part of the Earth’s surface every couple of days.

Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado is building WorldView-3 for commercial satellite operator DigitalGlobe. It is the latest in a series of spacecraft designed to beam back high-resolution pictures of our planet, images that most of us will eventually see on Google Maps or Google Earth.

This month Google Maps celebrates its ninth anniversary, and in June so does the company’s 3-D mapping app, Google Earth. Together they have changed the way we view the world. “Everybody I’m sure has looked up their house, their downtown, their business on Google Earth, and seen images from these satellites,” says Jeff Dierks, Program Manager at Ball. “It gives me a lot of pride when I see a satellite image on a news program with the DigitalGlobe logo on them.”

This clean room is where satellites such as Worldview-3 and
Worldview-2 (pictured) are built (Ball Aerospace).

Rather than operate its own spacecraft, Google buys its images from a small number of commercial satellite operators, and Dierks has worked on most of the satellites used. What’s surprising is how basic the technology is. “At its simplest, it is a decent resolution digital camera in space,” he explains, as we peer through the window into the clean room where the spacecraft is being built.

With its long cylindrical shape, WorldView-3 looks more like a telescope than a camera and it works on the same principle. The light comes in through a barrel structure, pointed at the Earth, and is bounced around by a series of mirrors, before being focused onto a CCD sensor. The big difference – apart from the size – between this and a typical handheld digital camera, is that the spacecraft will not just take snapshots but continuous images along thin strips of land or sea. Behind it, a giant Stars and Stripes flag has been painted across the wall. “Seeing the flag makes our government customers unbelievably happy,” laughs Dierks.

The satellite will be able to point to particular areas of interest and is capable of seeing objects just 25cm (10 inches) across. However, DigitalGlobe can only sell these highest-resolution images to customers in the US government. For everyone else, the company is only licensed to release images with a resolution of 50cm (20 inches). The latest US spy satellites, in comparison, are reported to be able to pick out objects less than 10cm (4 inches) across. But, for obvious reasons, the US military does not make those images available for free on Google.

DigitalGlobe's satellites have captured a wealth of views, such
as this of Paris' Versailles Palace (DigitalGlobe)

Still, from more than 600km away, travelling at around eight kilometers per second, capturing an image half-a-meter across is an impressive technical achievement, and is less likely to raise concerns about privacy.

Images from WorldView-3 will be sold to thousands of businesses for everything from urban planning to forest monitoring, oil exploration to map making. But most of us will probably use them to look at our house from space. Unfortunately, unless you live in a major city, then you are unlikely to benefit in the short term from the improved images captured by this new satellite.

“Large metropolitan areas get imaged most often,” Dierks concedes. “Once a year they pick cities like Denver or London and re-scan them and they get it into their database – how often Google buys those images and updates its maps, is up to them.”

Google is also only likely to purchase images captured on a cloud-free day. For some of us, this makes the odds of getting a new space picture of our house increasingly thin. “People ask ‘why can’t I see my new shed’, and I tell them to check back in a year or so,” Dierks says. In fact there is a good chance that, within the next year, if you look at a satellite picture of a major city it will include images captured by WorldView-3.

Ball Aerospace now has competition, Urthecast built new cameras
recently fitted to the International Space Station (NASA).

But today you also have the option of using services such as Bing or Apple maps, which also use images from DigitalGlobe. And very soon a new player will enter the market. Rather than pictures taken five years ago (the one of my house, for instance, is at least eight years old), UrtheCast promises live images of the Earth that anyone can download for free. Cosmonauts recently installed the Canadian company’s two UK-built cameras on the outside of the International Space Station (ISS) and the system will shortly enter its beta-testing phase. For those of us obsessed with looking at ourselves from space, this can only be good news.

Back in the clean room at Ball Aerospace in Colorado, Dierks is also looking forward to seeing his latest satellite in orbit. “If you talk to most of us here we've been space geeks for all of our lives,” he says. “I keep track of the satellite tracking programs on the computer at home and if it’s coming by, I’ll step out into the backyard and see the satellite I've built flying over. And that’s pretty neat.”