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Al Gore got the same amount of ridicule for proposing a satellite that would live-stream the earth 24/7. The trouble is that to get a good view, you have to be so far away that the resolution isn't scientifically or commercially valuable. And to get a daylight view 24/7, you'd have to be in a Lagrange point which is crazy far away - about 4x the distance to the moon. Eventually after years of pushing and shoving, someone came up with a reason to have a probe at L1 (studying solar weather), and they stuck a camera on the back, and now we have daily 2048x2048 multispectral images of the earth, always in full daylight! https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Sometimes it gets photobombed by the far side of the moon, and the images of solar eclipses are the best. https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/galleries




This might be the first time I’ve seen the dark side of the moon.


“Dark side of the moon” is a misnomer. Both sides of the moon receive equal amounts of light. A better term is “far side of the moon” since from earth we simply never see it.


Well not to mention that there's pretty sound arguments for not allowing the public access to high resolution live images of the earth.


Sure, I mean the low-rez version is pretty cool but no one would ever fund it. Related: The ISS usually has live video streaming from some external cameras. http://www.ustream.tv/channel/live-iss-stream (If it goes all blue, just give it a minute.)


Would love to read more about this.


I'm not sure if tracking and identifying individual humans from orbit is even optically feasible, but it can certainly be done for cars. And tanks.

Such a thing would be used by both sides in urban conflicts to "see round corners" and track targets.


If 40+ years ago NRO had meters resolution imagine what they could have today...

> A perfect 2.4-meter mirror observing in the visual (500 nm) would have a diffraction limited resolution of around 0.05 arcsec, which from an orbital altitude of 250 km would correspond to a ground sample distance of 0.06 m (6 cm, 2.4 inches). Operational resolution should be worse due to effects of the atmospheric turbulence.[24] Astronomer Clifford Stoll estimates that such a telescope could resolve up to "a couple inches. Not quite good enough to recognize a face".[25]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen


I suppose it depends on what we call high resolution, but I know for a fact I don't want a camera on me 24/7 when I'm outdoors. There are also whole cultures where personal photography is bad, and while it's not practical today to complete fufill their wishes, a livestream of the earth in high resolution would be pretty horrific I'm sure.




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