Trillion Pixel Earth Images: New Satellite

A New 50-Trillion-Pixel Image of Earth, Every Day

Thanks to a small group of Silicon Valley’s satellite startups, we may never look at our planet again the same way.

Robinson Meyer | March 9, 2016

It’s not just that Terra Bella Avenue would be an unremarkable street in Silicon Valley. It would be an unremarkable street anywhere in suburban America. The gray-brick low rises could sit at an intersection in Edison, New Jersey, or Skokie, Illinois, real-estate attorneys or school-district administrators shuffling in and out every day, and nothing would seem out of the ordinary.

But inside one of these buildings, past the cubicles and office kitchen, is a space-grade clean room where a man and woman are dusting off a new satellite the size of a dorm-room fridge. They’re clad in white, and their workspace resembles at once an auto shop, a high-school robotics lab, and the kind of gleaming NASA warehouses you see on the Discovery Channel.

Source: https://terrabella.google.com/?s=about-us&c=about-tour

<more at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/terra-bella-planet-labs/472734/; related links: https://terrabella.google.com/?s=our-mission&c=intro-1 (Terra Bella website) and http://9to5google.com/2016/03/08/googles-skybox-satellite-imagery-rebranded-terra-bella/ (Google’s ‘Skybox’ satellite imagery company rebranded as Terra Bella, more than a dozen satellites set to launch by 2020. March 8, 2016)>