This stunning photograph of the Eiffel Tower and River Seine was taken from 680km away, right above your heads, by Space Imaging's Ikonos satellite.
Ikonos is derived from the Greek word for "image" and is the world's first commercial satellite to collect black-and-white images with one-metre resolution and multispectral imagery with four-metre resolution. Ikonos circles the earth every 98 minutes and can resolve enough detail to spot someone reading a newspaper.
Space Imaging is celebrating a recent contract win from the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) to evaluate new search technology. This will allow large imagery databases to be scanned for elements such as vehicles, buildings, weapon systems and geographical landmarks. The evaluation started in April and will finish in August 2003.
Laurie Gibson, director, Research and Product Development of Space Imaging, says: "Space Imaging and Look Dynamics have already examined preliminary results from this technology, and they are very promising.
"Ultimately, we may be able to query the database to search for items of interest, and it will quickly come back with all applicable hits based on our search parameters. The potential applications for national security, where time is always of the essence, are very exciting."
Source: Flight Daily News