14 DAY TRIAL // Google has introduced brand new satellite imagery for the entire world. It has now created the most detailed, virtually cloud-free photo of the Earth ever put together. At a resolution of 15 meters per pixel, it is now the gold standard in satellite imagery.
Google used data from NASA and the US Geological Survey to create the stunning new image. It processed terabytes of images captured by the Landsat 7 satellite, looking for the best shots of every location on Earth.
Back in 2002, NASA released the Blue Marble photo of the Earth at a resolution of 1 kilometer per pixel. At the time, it was the clearest image of our planet. In 2005, NASA created an image twice as detailed.
But Google's efforts dwarf those previous versions; Google's imagery is 67 times more detailed than NASA's initial efforts.
That has to do with using Landsat imagery instead of MODIS data, but also with the computing effort needed to piece together such a detailed image from thousands of source files.
Not only had Google to look through all the images and pick the clearest and best exposed, it also had to deal with stripped artifacts generated by a hardware problem with Landsat 7.
"By analyzing a large number of images we were able to virtually eliminate these stripes, as well as clouds and other atmospheric effects. The process was very similar to how we produced the global time-lapse imagery of the earth that we released last month," Google explained.
The effort paid off, as Google was able to create an 800-gigapixel (800,000-megapixel) image of the Earth. Printed out at a 300 dpi resolution, the image would cover a city block.
Not only is this the most detailed image of our planet, but for some regions, it brings the most detailed views ever available in Maps, for example places like Siberia or central Africa. But Google isn't the only one making beautiful images of our world. MapBox, a mapping startup, has used a similarly advanced algorithm to create cloud-free and beautiful satellite images of the entire world.