Slashgeo

There is an ongoing discussion on Slashdot about this. Here is their summary: "Sony and the University of Alabama [in Hunstville] are working on a gigapixel resolution camera for improved satellite surveillance. It can see 10-km-square from an altitude of 7.5 kilometres with a resolution better than 50 centimetres per pixel. As well as removing annoying artefacts created by tiling images in Google Earth and similar, it should allow CCTV surveillance of entire cities with one camera. 'The trick is to build an array of light sensitive chips that each record small parts of a larger image and place them at the focal plane of a large multiple-lens system. The camera would have gigapixel resolution, and able to record images at a rate of 4 frames per second. The team suggests that such a camera mounted on an aircraft could provide images of a large city by itself. This would even allow individual vehicles to be monitored without any danger of losing them as they move from one ground level CCTV system to another.'" Update: 09/28 12:43 GMT by S :The Slashdot comments on the "7.5 km altitude orbit" claim underlines pertinent questions. In fact, we're talking about a UAV here, not really a satellite: "Mounted on the underside of an unmanned aerial vehicle, the gigapixel camera could provide almost real-time surveillance images of large areas for troops on the ground."