got geoint?

Many of us got to experience some pretty fun things while in college. From travels abroad to sports and let’s be honest, some good old-fashioned college partying. But, we have yet to run across any college students who get the rare privilege of crashing a NASA satellite. University of Colorado at Boulder undergraduates were lucky to have the opportunity to crash (come on now – how cool is that?) the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat, in the Arctic. The satellite had been in orbit for seven years – and UC Boulder students have been controlling the satellite for that time period. Why did they crash the satellite? The satellite had outlasted its targeted design life, before its primary sensor – a laser device intended for measuring ice thickness, forest cover – failed last year. So, yes, while college can often include learning how to do keg stands, it can also present an incredible opportunity like this for students. Go U.C. Boulder.

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We knew it would only be a matter of time before the business world and Wall Street collided with the GEOINT world. Did you know that Wall Street analysts now use satellite images to asses how well a business is doing? Neither did we. But, according to a most interesting CNBC article, UBS analyst Neil Currie had been looking at satellite data on Wal-Mart during each month of 2010, and he’d concluded that there was enough correlation between what he was seeing in the satellite pictures of Wal-Mart’s parking lots to the big-box chain’s quarterly earnings, that he was ready to incorporate that data into UBS’ report on Wal-Mart, which releases its earnings today. The way this works is that both GeoEye and DigitalGlobe sells these types of Wal-Mart images to an analysis firm, which scrutinizes the images and sell the aggregated data to hedge funds and Wall Street analysts. Wall Street and GEOINT come together.

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Wired’s “Danger Room” blog recently came out with a post that featured an image from DigitalGlobe of a purported to be a Chinese anti-satellite laser weapon site. According to the post, space security experts are uncertain that it is an actual anti-satellite laser weapon site because it is difficult to tell the difference between a laser research lab, stargazing facility, range finder, or a full-on weapon site. There is reason to not be skeptical — China has made no secret of its interest in developing space weapons. The country fired lasers at U.S. satellites, possibly blinding the spacecraft for a bit in 2006. And in 2007, Beijing used to a missile to destroy an old weather satellite in orbit.

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52 years after the launch of Sputnik, you can now officially launch your own satellite into low earth orbit for the low price of $8,000.00 with TubeSat from Interobital Systems. Despite the heavy price tag, it is very very cool. Basically, once it is launched you get to track it with a ham radio for a few weeks before it burns up upon re-entry. The TubeSat kit comes with batteries and solar panels and transmitters and antennas and a number of other tools for running experiments from space. The company suggests running biological experiments and even doing “on-orbit advertising.” Hmmm…not sure how that will work…

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As many of you may have seen last week, USGIF member, GeoEye made available its first high-resolution imagery from its GeoEye-1 satellite on Google Earth. We recommend you peruse the Google Earth preview site to check out the images. In addition, we have pulled a few key images for your enjoyment below.

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