"largest fleet of satellites in human history."

HAD PICTURES OF INSIDE OF BIN LADEN COMPOUND

Tonight we will take you inside the intelligence agency where those photos are analyzed, and we will also take you inside a revolution that is rocking the top secret world of spy satellites. A private company named Planet Labs has put about 300 small satellites into space, enough to take a picture of the entire land mass of the Earth every day. Those small satellites have created a big data problem for the government which can't possibly hire enough analysts to look at all those pictures. Welcome to the revolution.

We see rivers move, we see trees go down, we see vehicles move, we see road surfaces change and it gives you a perspective of the planet as a dynamic and evolving thing that we need to take care of.

Robert Cardillo: This is what NGA developed in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden.

Before President Obama and his national security team, including Cardillo there on the left, gathered in the White House Situation Room on the night of the raid, NGA had gone back in time through seven years of satellite imagery to construct this scale model of Bin Laden's hideout.

Robert Cardillo: We had historic imagery of this compound that enabled us to reverse time.

NGA could see not just the outside, but inside as well.

Robert Cardillo: It enabled us to go back to the point of construction. And essentially through our imagery archive to rebuild the house so, we could see how the first floor was designed and how the rooms would lay out, where are the stairs from the first to the second floor and the second to the third floor.

David Martin: So old pictures show that building before the roof went on?

Robert Cardillo: We had pictures before the compound existed. We saw it when it was first constructed and as it, as it was built over time. Correct.

We did some calculations and we came up with six million humans would need to be hired to exploit all the imagery that we have access to. You can see that it's not exactly a viable proposition

So, what we've done is created a algorithm that looks for new roads and buildings.

An algorithm that rifled through reams of satellite photos and identified the first signs of a new refugee camp.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/private-company-launches-largest-fleet-of-satellites-in-human-history-to-photograph-earth-60-minutes/