New Sensors on the Horizon May 12, 2016 Steve Harford, PhD Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. Chief Technologist 12 May 2016

New Sensors seek more balance between types of RESOLUTION Actionable Information from Spatial Resolution How many cars are in the parking lot? Intensity vs. x,y position In the 1990s and 2000s, new sensors were generally focused on improving spatial resolution IKONOS  QuickBird  GeoEye  WorldView Actionable Information from Temporal Resolution How quickly is the parking lot filling up? Intensity vs. time In the present day, new sensors are generally focused on improving temporal resolution Actionable Information from Spectral Resolution Is that vegetation dead or alive? Intensity vs. wavelength In the 2020s, new sensors are likely to be focused on improving spectral resolution

Remote Sensing Data trending toward higher Temporal Resolution The current trend in remote sensing is to increase temporal resolution (increase revisit frequency) by proliferation and fusion of distributed assets on smallSats, aircraft, & UAVs Domestic companies: SkyBox Imaging, BlackSky, Planet Labs, OmniEarth Domestic Government agencies: NASA, NGA International companies: DMCii, IAI, ImageSat, Thales, Urthecast International Government agencies: KARI, MDA, ESA, JAXA, ISRO Enabler #1: Exponential increases in storage, processing, and data movement Moore's Law Enabler #2: Autonomy Collection Tasking Deep machine learning to automatically search and exploit Artificial intelligence

The Future of Remote Sensing Data The future will consist of today’s high spatial resolution with tomorrow’s high temporal resolution Data Collection Challenges Lower SWaP sensors Lower cost Enable proliferation Data Processing Challenges Combination of separate sensors Synthetic Aperture / Super-resolution Data overlay Enable fusion Future of Remote Sensing WorldView 3 Data Processing path to the future Skybox Imaging Spatial Resolution PlanetLabs Temporal Resolution