It's not new, it's just not terribly effective for something as small as a person, for reasons already pointed out a few posts back. If you want another example, pull up Google and zoom in on a populated area and see what people look like (keeping in mind you see more of their shadow than you do of them, since you're essentially looking at their head and shoulders unless they're laying down - find a beach for that, which also has the benefit of being high-contrast). However it could potentially spot a tent or spread out blanket or some other such emergency signal.polar wrote:Do you have access to real-time satellite images? Is this a new front in search and rescue we haven't heard about?
Lifes is almost certainly referring to Tomnod http://www.tomnod.com/, something I first heard about a few years ago when they had a campaign going for... well I don't remember the name, I just remember it was a guy sailing his own boat that went missing in some stretch of ocean. Tomnod was mentioned earlier in one of these threads about this specific missing person. All I recall reading was that they were going to contact them to start a campaign, not that one had been launched. I see from the landing page that they got one up and running, so for the benefit of others (maybe I just missed it) click the link above and you can help as well. It just takes a web browser.
As someone who works with imagery on a not infrequent basis, I'll also point out that when you get into areas of high relief (in other words a lot of elevation change in a very short distance), things get even more problematic for satellite and even aerial images. A lot of people tend to look at Google and think it's this straight-down, everything visible from above, map-like image. It's not, it's a BUNCH of stitched together photos each taken from a single point (as in take a picture, go x feet forward, take another), just like any picture you would take. As a result when it gets stitched together things like vertical cliffs, or more to the point things behind other things get distorted and warped. You've likely seen this yourself on Google in some places. Back in 2013 when we had the floods up here in the Thompson Canyon, a project similar to Tomnod was launched that made it so people scanned a section of image and marked affected buildings and sections of road. But in looking at some of that imagery there were entire stretches of the canyon that you couldn't see the bottom because of the angle from which the picture was taken (in space). The road would be quite visible and appear to vanish into rocks - not because it was damaged and washed away, but because the mountains on the side of the canyon the satellite was on were blocking the view.
Digital Globe is a company based here locally that operates some of the highest resolution, commercially available (ie not military) satellites that are currently available. They supply the imagery for Tomnod, and often donate recent imagery to emergency management agencies in disaster events such as the flooding up here I mentioned earlier.