With detailed satellite imagery, why can’t we see garbage in the oceans on digital maps or on Google Earth?
In: Technology
Because movies have lied to you
Most satellite imagery is around 0.5-1 meter/pixel. GeoEye-1 is one of the better commercial satellites at 0.41 meters/pixel, a Keyhole-11 era spy satellite with its 2.4 meter mirror might pull off 0.1 meters/pixel
That’s enough to see that there is a person somewhere, but not enough to see who it is.
With the 0.5 meter resolution images you’re seeing on Google you might see a difference in the color of the ocean where the garbage patch is but you certainly won’t see individual pieces of trash and the computer likely sorts it out. Google wants to give good imagery so the computers run through images and try to pick ones without clouds/planes/debris. And particularly for the deep ocean they tend to just replace it with a nice smooth texture because there’s no real info to be had more than a few miles from shore so they don’t need to store terabytes of additional useless data.
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