A guy in GA who was very secretive about his growing had been caught recently. He grew outdoors in a field behind his house. The field was reletively empty. Some contractors looking to buy the place out were serveying the area when they noticed the 7 ft tall plants and took it upon themselves to call the police. The police apparently told them to leave the plants alone, and that the person responsible would be caught. for the next few days satellites, like the ones orbiting the planet, were used to take constant pictures of the area. The man was eventually caught watering the plants.
After being caught the man said that a few of the more mature plants were missing. I had an idea of where they might have gone...

Most of these satallites in polar orbits that precess with the sun line require three (3) days to return to the same position.
Thus it would take three days to cover ALL the US, & so you'd only need 77.6 TB per 3/days NOT per second.
.....there is probably a lo-res FOV of the order of about 1 pixel per 1 SqKm which is the FOV that covers the whole earth every 3 days.
The hi-res 1 pixel per (61cm)squred FOV instrument more than likely has a keyhole FOV that can be targeted from the ground.

The downlink data rate is prob about 4GB/hr and prob will continue for about 12 years (based on other similar sat's)......a 93 minute orbit... It can only take 1 swab of an area per orbit.. so that's 1 picture every 93 minutes. (And it's FOV is 15km, you rotate further than 15km in 93 minutes, so they have to wait 3 days to get back to the same exact spot)

Unless they used this as a test of the system (for other ops), that is the only way I could see them using such a high cost item, to catch some lone grower.

Moral of this story is to grow your bud in small patches of less than one sq meter each, or better yet, less than half a square meter each so that the surouning vegitation fills in each pixal.

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He couldnt be that secrative letting servey's walk over his land.. and if he didnt he should of either shot them or sued them..in the mean time though..

..check out NIDA's Ganja farm 'http://www.googleearthhacks.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7186'
.. you need google earth to view it though...

That's the thing, it wasn't his land. However possible this seems doesn't change the fact that this is what was reported in the article. I agree with you silver, sounds like alot to go through just to stop one of millions in the growing community. Whatever money they would spend on such an operation wouldn't come from their pockets.
I don't know, I think the government likes to create stories like this one when they catch people to make us think they've always got an eye on us. Somewhat like a scare tactic.