NEW!! Covering the earth video from space within seconds.

The main aim of this is to use satellite photography to help clients when arguing cases in court – anything from property border disputes, to establishing rights of way, locating stolen vehicles and illegal landfills – or proving serious environmental harm to vital wetlands and ancient woodlands.
Purdy, a space lawyer, and Harris, a geographer schooled in the use of geospatial imagery and databases, set up their space detective agency, Air & Space Evidence, in October 2014. Both hail from University College London, but Purdy is now a student of Oxford University.
Their familiarity with imaging satellites, and how the law applies, gives them a distinct advantage. And the technology can be extremely important to. “With resolution as high as 30 centimetres you can see a mailbox or a manhole cover from space now,” says Purdy.
Their arrival on the detective scene certainly stirred public imaginations. While the pair expected some attention when they announced their venture, they were surprised by the response as the media clicked they were planning to offer something new. “The reaction was completely unexpected.There was phone call after phone call for about two months. We had virtually every single British newspaper, plus magazines and TV production companies wanting to make fly-on-the-wall documentaries. We’re still getting the TV calls now,” Purdy says.
A lot of people assumed there would be video satellites, not just snapshots – Ray Purdy
Many had, however, firmly grasped the wrong end of the stick. Thanks to TV dramas like Homeland and Spooks, many believed the planet’s surface is being constantly video recorded from space – and at extremely high resolution to boot. A lot of the detectives’ early work has involved putting would-be clients straight over the real capabilities of today’s space imaging systems.
For instance, A potential customer wanted to see who had hammered nails into her car tyres. Other clients have wanted them to identify vehicles used in a burglary and a bank robbery – including the expectation of seeing licence plates from orbit. “A lot of people assumed there would be video satellites, not just snapshots,” says Purdy. “I can’t blame people. It’s quite exciting and the technology is moving fast. But not as fast as some might think.”

Visual time travel
Although video-recording satellites do exist they don’t have the resolution of the best stills cameras in orbit – and can’t yet offer extended coverage. Google-owned Skybox Imaging, for instance, is building a fleet of imaging Cubesats in low-Earth orbit. These are capable of providing 90-second-long clips of video over a spot on Earth – before it moves out of range.
Eventually they will be able to do this over one spot many times each day as the fleet approaches its target of 24 satellites – but that isn’t necessarily at the precise time somebody might want it.
One of the space detectives’ first paid-for cases involved a Californian who had a neighbour claim that an online mapping service showed a right of way existed right through his property – and the neighbour wanted it formally recognised. “By going back to original space imagery over time we could determine that there had never been a track or road there,” says Purdy. That visual time travel trick was possible because space images have been archived by satellite companies since the 1970s – initially in low resolution but gradually improving until, in 1999, images that could resolve down to less than a metre became available outside the military, and now pin-sharp 50cm and 30 cm images possible today.
Image timelines are crucial to all this – and Purdy’s experience as a space lawyer, knowing what makes for admissible evidential imagery, is key. “We have to be able to make the court believe they can rely on it as evidence,” he says. That involves proving the image has been properly stored and that no disturbance has been made to it.
The agency was asked if it could spot from space which ship had collided with an offshore wind turbine
Space images can form part of a complex web of evidence. Boundary disputes are common cases for A&SE and the imagery often aids determine which side was right. But the agency cannot always help: as clouds, shadows, bushes and brambles can get in the way on some crucial historic images showing, for example, where a fence line was a decade ago.
In one case they were asked to look at the illegal dredging of a lake which is a protected European wetland (because court proceedings are still going on, it can’t be named). They were able to source images revealing the number and size of dredging operations, and provide evidence of how much dredged sand was being stored alongside the lake – and even how the volumes had changed dramatically over the years.