At first glance it isn't a very impressive picture. If you didn't know better you might mistake it for a souvenir photo from a helicopter sightseeing trip around Manhattan. It is only when you take a closer look and recognize the different types of vintage aircraft on the flight deck of the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum that you realize you are viewing something truly spectacular. See those tiny white streaks on the street next to the dock where the retired carrier is berthed? Those are the white lines on 12th Avenue. Move over a few blocks to the east to Times Square and follow Broadway toward Central Park to the corner of 57th Street. Here, somewhat hidden in the shadows, you'll find the roof of the building that POPULAR MECHANICS calls home. What makes this "aerial photo" important isn't what it reveals but how it was taken. You are looking at the first 1-meter-resolution color images taken from more than 400 miles in space. Until now, only the elite of the intelligence community had seen the world so clearly from so far away. For about $2000, Space Imaging of Thornton, Colo., will point and click its Ikonos spy-in-the-sky satellite just about anywhere you ask, from an ultrasecret North Korean missile base to your next-door neighbor's swimming pool.

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Skeptical of CIA claims that North Korea had advanced ICBMs that could reach the United States, the Federation of American Scientists purchased 1-meter Ikonos images showing a relatively primitive and poorly maintained missile site. (Detail shown in photos below).

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At 1-meter-resolution you can almost see passengers at San Francisco Airport.

5-METER RESOLUTION

Sharper And Sharper

Photos taken from space are old news. For decades environmental scientists and urban planners have been able to get a handle on the "big picture" with 30-meter-resolution images like those shown below. The next improvement came with the advent of 5-meter imaging. The leap from 5- to 1-meter-resolution means Ikonos can distinguish among objects that are approximately 3 ft. (a meter is a little more than 3 ft. in length) across. You might not be able to see whether your neighbor swims in the buff, but you will be able to tell whether he does the breast stroke or doggie paddle.

In several respects, 1 meter represents a magic number for the satellite business. "One meter is the minimum resolution for making an accurate map. You can see the white lines on a street," says John Copple, chief executive officer of Space Imaging, during our visit to the company's headquarters.

Adding color to a 1- meter image makes something more spectacular happen. Suddenly, uncertain structures become as clear as the face you shave every morning. You don't just see the airport, you can see whether the passenger loading ramps are pulled alongside the planes. "With 1-meter color you're talking about using the spatial processing system that God gave you," says Copple. For many applications, including crop planning, traffic planning and disaster relief, there is no longer the need for a trained photo interpreter to explain what the camera has recorded. What you see is what you get.

Fast Retakes

In addition to providing civilians with the best space images ever, Ikonos can deliver them fast. Riding an orbit that takes it over the north and south poles, the satellite can look down at any place on Earth once every three or so days. "This timeliness means that farmers can use close-ups to monitor the health of crops and better estimate yields," explains Space Imaging spokesperson Linda Lidov as she escorts PM into the company's satellite control room. It is a modest, gray space about the size of a finished basement in a typical suburban home, divided into a half-dozen desk-height work areas. Operators sit before computer monitors, their backs to a waist-to-ceiling window that runs the length of the wall separating the control room from the reception area. They face a pair of pull-down movie screens. One displays a spreadsheet-like grid with "tasking" instructions that tell where the satellite should be aimed next. The other screen displays a map of the world superimposed with the satellite's orbit and present location. A tiny skull and crossbones in the South Pacific catches our attention. "That's where we think the first satellite went down," says Lidov.

Even with the loss of that first Ikonos satellite due to a launch failure in 1999, it has cost less than $1 billion to create the company. Military and intelligence space satellite budgets are, of course, classified, but those who are knowledgeable about such things estimate that this is about as much as Uncle Sam spends each week to maintain his fleet of spy satellites. And now Ikonos is being used to challenge threat assessments based on images from these intelligence satellites. Recently, the Federation of American Scientists (www.fas.org) published 1-meter images of a North Korean missile site that clearly shows that an alleged ICBM base is less advanced than the CIA has claimed.

Upping The Contrast

We pull up a chair alongside one of the workstations and see what is happening upstairs. "Products are delivered as 11-bit black-and-white images. This corresponds to 2048 shades of gray per pixel, compared to 256 shades of gray per pixel in traditional 8-bit imagery," explains Lidov. More data means more detail in shadows and brightly lit areas. To illustrate this point, Bryan McFadden, manager of product applications, calls up an image of an ice sheet. As an 8-bit image it appears stark white. Displayed in 11 bits, the shadows cast by the windblown snow stand out as clearly as the detail on an Ansel Adams landscape.

At another workstation, Randy Owen, manager of systems operations, prepares to aim Ikonos at the Mayon Volcano, 215 miles southeast of Manila in
the Philippines. Hours before PM's visit in late February, the volcano had begun spewing lava and ash. The 8118-ft. volcano, which had erupted 45 times since 1616, is a major tourist attraction because of its textbook-perfect cone. If the eruption continues, ash and vapor clouds will obscure the view from space. The image that the satellite captures could be critical to planning evacuation routes.

As we walk through the computer rooms where individual images are stored on hundreds of CDs, Lidov explains the secret to Space Imaging's seemingly overnight success. The company's investors, affiliates and strategic partners are the same people who, for all intents and purposes, created the spy satellite industry. Chief among them are defense giants Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, which built and launched Ikonos and operate key parts of this operations center. Clearly, the most impressive piece of technology is the Kodak camera aboard the Ikonos satellite. To provide the required reflective characteristics, the telescope's mirrors had to be finished to atomic-level smoothness. "Opticians shaped the telescope's 28-in.-dia. primary mirror so perfectly that if it were enlarged to 100 miles in diameter, you could drive that distance and not hit any bumps higher than eight-hundredths of an inch," brags a Kodak spokesman. "Optical precision of this magnitude is what enables this camera system to produce the highest-quality imagery."

An equally challenging problem was to make the camera light enough to fly into space. To reduce the weight of the primary mirror, Kodak cut a honeycomb pattern into its core using abrasive waterjet technology. The camera's electronic "eyes" capture imagery across about a 7-mile stretch of the Earth's surface. A digital processing unit compresses and formats the imagery for transmission to Space Imaging's ground stations located around the globe.

"Customers can order images of any geographic location in the world," says Conrad Mueller, Space Imaging's vice president for international sales and marketing. In fact, some images can even be purchased over the Internet. "Our only limitation is cloud cover."