Algorithms For Dummies

 

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Satellites: Recording images from the entire globe and sending them back to 

earth in order to monitor the Earth’s surface and its atmosphere isn’t a new 

business (TIROS 1, the first satellite to send back images and data, dates back 

to 1960). Over the years, however, the world has launched more than 1,400 

active satellites that provide earth observation. The amount of data arriving 

on earth is astonishing and serves both military (surveillance) and civilian 

purposes, such as tracking economic development, monitoring agriculture, 

and monitoring changes and risks. A single European Space Agency’s satellite, 

Sentinel 1A, generates 5PB of data during two years of operation, as you 

can read at 

https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/04/28/europes- 

sentinel-satellites-generating-huge-big-data-archive/

).

Accompanying these older data trends, new amounts of data are now generated or 

carried about by the Internet, creating new issues and requiring solutions in terms 

of both data storage and algorithms for processing: