Google provides non-profit organizations with up-to-date satellite images

Google has announced that its recently acquired company Skybox, known for its high-quality satellite imaging, is to begin giving away satellite images to help people do goo things. But don’t worry: you’ll be able to see them too. The new scheme, called Skybox For Good, will see the company provide up-to-date satellite photos to people and organizations in order to help support their good work. From understanding climate change to clearing landmines, the hope is that the images can help provide an extra level of information to understand what’s happening on the surface of our planet.

On the heels of acquiring satellite startup Skybox in August, Google and Skybox have announced the Skybox for Good program, which will provide real-time satellite imagery to organizations and programs that save lives, protect the environment, promote education and positively impact humanity, according to the official blog post. The program launches today in beta with a small group of partners. The images provided to these organizations will be publicly available under a Creative Commons license. This will allow organizations like Sky Truth and Appalachian Voices to keep an eye on “mountain-top removal mining,” which threatens to devastate the forests of the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia. Another example given in the announcement was images of a Northern Sri Lanka village called Nagarkovil, which were given to HALO to help them verify that the area was safe, after previously removing land mines.