You Can See it From Space

You Can See it From Space
By Tim Pipp

It used to be that you could define how big, or ‘great’, something was, by adding the qualifier, “..you can see it from space!” The fact that you could see a man-made or natural creation from space was an amazing description of its sheer size. As earthlings learned to send manned spacecraft, satellite-based cameras or other imaging devices into space, and, more importantly, transmit that information back to earth, a broader picture of the world we existed in, created, modified, and sometimes destroyed, became evident. Some of the early examples of things that you could see from space are the Great Wall of China, the Great Barrier Reef, the Grand Canyon, and the peaks of the world’s great mountain ranges and paths of the great rivers.

Fast forward from those early imaging days – they were so 1960′s, anyways – to today. The technological advances are amazing – both in imaging capabilities and transmission from space directly to your home office computer or cell phone. Take the GeoEye-1 satellite, for example. It flies through space overhead at an altitude of 400 miles, each picture can capture a piece of the earth that is about 10 miles wide, all with the resolution of about 16 inches! All that data is seamlessly transmitted back to land for data processing and image production. This means that you can not only see the Great Wall of China, but also take a virtual overhead tour of the entire Wall from the chair you are sitting in. With the addition of 3D technology in Google Earth, you can get a perspective of the terrain surrounding the Wall, too. You can also take a tour of any city and check out the skyline, or fly through the Grand Canyon.

What’s more amazing is that if you keep zooming in to an area – and then zoom in just one last time – you are automatically transferred to another data set. This is terrestrial data, collected from a car with some weird gadget on top taking pictures at street level. I picture a digitized, 21st century Ansel Adams, standing on top of his car capturing images, except this is in mass production mode with no skill required. With the data from the space images directly correlated to the terrestrial drive-bys based on GPS coordinates, you can virtually sky dive from space and land right outside your door. There are flaws, especially with the rapid construction of neighborhoods and the lag-time of the latest images becoming publicly available. Our house, for example, as seen from space, is still a construction pit without a foundation. Zoom in to street level, however, and out of the dirt appears our house, our car in the driveway, and a perfect record of how well we did shoveling the sidewalks after a snowstorm this past winter.

The damage and alterations we cause the Earth can also be seen, however. This includes the Bingham Copper Mine of Utah, oil and natural gas wells near Hobbs, NM (each white dot is another well), and the dead Colorado River Delta in the Gulf of California, Mexico, which used to be a wetlands but is now a mudflat. Something that is artificially imposed on the space images, which can’t really be seen from space, are borders. When viewed from space, borders, territories, and states do not exist. I think John Lennon would disable the “show labels” option when using Google Maps.

But I look forward to how quickly these imaging databases will advance from today. I got a taste of it today – I just took a quick tour of Olympus Mons, a 90,000 foot tall behemoth of a mountain on mars (the largest known volcano in the solar system), with Google Earth (or Google Mars?). A handful of high-resolution space-based images are also available, which allow you to tour the slopes of the great mountain and search for possible hiking routes to the summit. Maybe one day we’ll be saying, “you can see him from space, standing on the top of Olympus Mons!” And the next time you look up at the sky – smile! – we may be able to see you from space, too.

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