Google sharpens Earth, Maps satellite imagery in new update

Google has updated Google Earth with the imagery from Landsat 8, which was launched into the orbit in 2013.

hree years ago, Google introduced a cloud-free mosaic of the world, giving Google Earth and Google Map users a better and more accurate view of the Earth. Now, the search giant has decided to improve on its technique— to provide crisp imagery from NASA and the US Geographical Surveys Landsat 8 satellite.

Earlier, Google managed to provide cloud-free images using imagery from the Landsat 7 satellite. Unfortunately, Landsat 7 images captured after 2003 were affected by a hardware failure, resulting in large diagonal gaps of missing data.

Now Google has updated Google Earth with the imagery from Landsat 8, which was launched into the orbit in 2013.

In a blogpost Google said, ‘Landsat 8 captures images with greater detail, truer colours, and at an unprecedented frequency—capturing twice as many images as Landsat 7 does every day.'

‘Like our previous mosaic, we mined data from nearly a petabyte of Landsat imagery—that’s more than 700 trillion individual pixels—to choose the best cloud-free pixels. To put that in perspective, 700 trillion pixels is 7,000 times more pixels than the estimated number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, or 70 times more pixels than the estimated number of galaxies in the Universe,’ Google added.