Tracking Whales from Space

Images taken from satellites 480 miles above the Earth are being used to track whale populations and migrations.

Conservationists from the British Antarctic Survey are using state-of-the-art satellite technology to see deeper into the ocean and can actually identify individual whales from space. The satellite WorldView2 is being used because of its ‘water penetrating coastal band’ in the far-blue of the camera’s spectrum, which allows it to capture images further into the ocean. Each image uses over 2.5GB of memory, which is 1,300 times more than that used by the average iPhone photo.