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| Photo courtesy UrtheCast |
I love maps. It doesn't matter if they are 400 year old representations of the known world, or the satellite images from the internet mapping sites. Man-made borders change, natural disasters leave their mark, but you still rarely get the chance to see the beauty of the earth. I've always loved seeing the world from an airplane and have been lucky enough to fly over some incredible sights - the Hudson Bay when the ice was just starting to break up, glaciers and icy coastlines in Greenland, the Sydney Opera House, the Grand Canyon - all from a height that shows you the detail of silt running from the mouths of rivers into the ocean, of reefs and islands, cities and farmland. The circular fields, seen from above, certainly take you by surprise.
I could go on, but this post is about a new way to see the world. In the news this week were details about a spacewalk by two Russian cosmonauts who placed (or should I say replaced) cameras on the International Space Station that will be permanently pointed below, and there will be a live feed on the website www.urthecast.com.
This is the story from www.businessweek.com -
Scott Larson just survived a particularly stressful month during which the equipment he sent to the International Space Station sat in limbo. His startup, the Canada-based UrtheCast, created special still and video cameras able to withstand space radiation and extreme temperatures in order to record earth from space in high resolution. The cameras arrived at the space station last fall, and after an eight-hour spacewalk on Dec 27, they were installed. Only they didn't appear to work right, Larson says.
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| Photo courtesy UrtheCast |
So the cameras were taken down. A station-related issue was fixed over several days, and the equipment was finally mounted during a six-hour spacewalk on Tuesday. "There have been a lot of tense moments" says Larson, whose company raised $68 million for the project. "It's space, and stuff happens in space, and you never quite know. There are always technical issues in any kind of engineering project. But because there are people out there, they can fix them. That's been a huge asset."
From here on, UrtheCast hopes for smooth travels as the space station orbits the earth 16 times every day. The nearly 70-employee company will spend several weeks calibrating the cameras, which will send their first image back to earth in February. "We hope it's spectacular, we don't know what it's going to be," Larson says.
Once initial tests are wrapped up, UrtheCast expects to start selling space imagery to clients in farming, urban planning, media, and other industries at the end of the second quarter. The company has already signed distribution agreements for $21 million annually, according to Larson, and will also begin streaming images onto the Web in the third quarter - in effect challenging Google Earth with a free video-imaging service.
A 4.5 foot long camera will record 90-second videos 150 times a day as the station circles the planet, Larson says, while a second camera will continuously snap still photos. Together, the stills will cover a 47.3 kilometer wide swatch of the planet and generate 2.5 terabytes of data a day, the equivalent of about 270 full length movies. UrtheCast's engineers will condense and post the visuals to the company's website within a few hours.
"I think everyone in the world will want to come to the website at least once," Larson says.
-oOo-
I'll certainly be one of the "everyone in the world ..." who regularly visits the website. I can't wait.
I wish UrtheCast.com all the good luck in ... well ... the world, with their new venture, and I hope it's a very successful business both for them, the farmers and urban planners, and just plain Joe (or Jo) Public who will get the chance to see the beauty around them.
Note: I wish I knew where the top photo was taken as it's an amazing image from the website. It's a coastline that probably looks completely different when you're on the ground.
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