[WhiteOwlEd]

Is there a reasonably priced service (for individual budgets and not corporation budgets) that would allow you to rent a satellite in order to for example count the number of Teslas that are out on the road in a given city in the United States?

[fxtentacle]

Usually non-military satellites max out at 1 pixel per 30 cm, so the resolution will most likely be too bad to decide if it's a Tesla or not.

[sennight]

That might be too low of a resolution for RGB, I have a feeling that few cars would share the same spectral signature in the commonly measured bands. A lot of papers have been written on vehicle identification using SAR - so that would probably be the way to go.

[seshagiric]

There are startups like Albedo attempting at 10cm satellite imagery, but apparently 3-4 years away from launching.

[mistrial9]

not possible -- the "complete coverage" companies have to deal with clouds and other atmospheric elements. Good math helps a lot with creating landuse coverages, but you can never increase the detail as you are asking

[renjimen]

You could use SAR to observe independent of lighting and climate. I’m not sure how good the coverage is right now but it’s improving (see Iceye and Capella). Resolution for car ID though… I’m not sure it’s up to that

[jiert]

Planet has some services that use machine learning to count ships and detect roads. I believe you might be able to run your own models on the data, but detecting teslas vs other cars would be difficult at current resolutions. Unfortunately not reasonably priced for individuals

[unionpivo]

I don't think its currently even in corporations budget ranges.

Not sure how much resolution military sat's have (I assume you are USA), but even with them it might be challenging to identify teslas from top down.

And don't forget about clouds.

If you need such good resolution, getting some survey planes, or maybe some drones, might be a lot more feasible.

And you could then take pictures at an angle, which would serve to easier identify teslas.

[aerostable_slug]

Note that modern reconnaissance satellites can take pictures quite far off-axis (as demonstrated by the Morison leaks to Jane's).

[thakoppno]

humor me, what’s the angle - front running quarterly financial results?

[dan-robertson]

The thing you describe is not front-running.

[thakoppno]

You’re right.

I am just curious how one could capitalize off knowing the number of Teslas on the road at any given moment.