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Watching Syria and Israel Conflit with Satellite Imagery
posted by Satri
on Friday October 26, @12:11PM
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from the we-are-big-brother-and-we're-watching-all-of-you dept.
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from the we-are-big-brother-and-we're-watching-all-of-you dept.
Ogle Earth discuss and links the quick demolition of a potential Syrian nuclear facility after the Israel September 6th attack shown through satellite imagery (with screenshots). There's a link to a BBC News article and a New York Times article. While the geospatial content of this story is rather low, it clearly shows how satellite imagery is more than ever before a effective detective tool for the military and the general public. From the NYT article: "David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that this week released a report on the Syrian site, said Thursday that the building’s removal was inherently suspicious.
“It looks like Syria is trying to hide something and destroy the evidence of some activity,” Mr. Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector, said in an interview. “But it won’t work. Syria has got to answer questions about what it was doing.”" See other interesting related previous stories below. And if you wonder, high resolution satellite imagery for this area is available in Google Earth but not Google Maps at the moment.
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ali safarnejad writes "Under the auspice of the Food Insecurity and Vulnerability Information and Mapping System (FIVIMS) initiative of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, the KIDS project was initiated in 2001. KIDS (Key Indicator Data System) was initially funded for development to address the Southeast Asian national and sub-national data dissemination, analysis and visualization needs. With a grant from the Japanese Government, the first version of KIDS (FIVIMS for Asia, http://www.asiafivims.net/ was born, and deployed in Bangkok, Thailand to serve neighboring countries. To learn more about the KIDS project, and to download a fully functional, unbranded, royalty free version of the product, along with all the source code, visit our website at http://kids.fao.org/" Read more below.
Israel - Lebanon Conflict and Geospatial Data Access
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The Ogle Earth blog share an interesting entry on the impact of geospatial technologies and data access on the Israel - Lebanon conflict. From a Defense-Update article: "Target analysis, including coordinates gathering has been dramatically improved in recent months, as a significant part of Israel was included in "Google Earth" service, offering everyone a free access to relatively high resolution satellite images of Israel, provided with fairly accurate GPS coordinates which are accurate enough to support the aiming of rocket attacks."
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Google Product Manager Dave Barth writes from the Google Lat Long Blog, "Here's great news for all of the virtual explorers out there: Today we added 54 new countries to Google Maps! We've more than doubled our coverage of Latin America and are now mapping three times as many countries in Asia as before." Some of the more interesting additions include: Afganistan, Iran (I'm guessing no StreetView with that anytime soon), Pakistan, Syria, and of course the one everyone was clamoring for, Timor-Leste.
Industry: New Google Earth/Map Imagery and Terrorism
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Since our readers like to know, the official Google blog informs us of the new imagery they added this week, and instead of riddles, here's where the new Google Earth / Maps imagery is: "[...] this release has mostly aerial (higher-resolution) data, as well as some medium-resolution imagery for large swaths of land. [...] 2.5m imagery for the entire countries of: Tunisia, UAE, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. [...] Updated Terrain: Canada (20m and 90m) and Niagara Falls" Regarding imagery in sensible areas, Ogle Earth has a discussion and a video on 'terrorist' using Google Earth to 'plan their attacks on the Israeli military'. You'll find in related stories below several discussions on terrorism and virtual globes.
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Some interesting news item: Spatial Sustain discuss a long Nature article on Earth Monitoring. Meanwhile, Space.com tells us Italy successfully launched COSMO (previously mentioned), dubbed "the second of four Italian mapping satellites that are planned for the Constellation of Small Satellites for Mediterranean basin Observation (COSMO)" by SS. Additionally, SS underlines the launch of the Mapping Center of Israel with 120 layers (in Hebrew only). And finally, APB tells us about Localvore, the 2007 word of the year for the Oxford American Dictionary, as you have probably guessed, a locavore is someone who eats food grown or produced locally. From the Nature article: "If that increase in technological capability can be turned into usable systems, then the ability to monitor Earth's environment will be revolutionized. Real-time and near-real-time data will be available on soil moisture, greenhouse-gas concentrations, biological productivity, aerosol concentrations and so on, all around the world. With those data, scientists will be able to build and study models of Earth as a system far beyond what they have today."
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Spatial Sustain runs a short entry on Israel's launch of an advanced spy satellite. From the blog: "[...] Israel launched an advanced spy satellite that will be able to track events in Iran. The TECSAR satellite is equipped with a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor, and it was launched from India aboard an Indian rocket." This related Jerusalem Post article is also interesting: "Teheran's attempts to sabotage the operation may demonstrate concerns over Israel's advancing intelligence capabilities. "The Iranians are scared of the potential this new satellite will bring Israel," a Western defense official had said earlier. "They are doing everything they can to prevent its launch.""
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