Google has extended it’s good works to nonprofit organizations by offering for free satellite images as a form of support. Real-time satellite imagery company Skybox, which was acquired by the tech giant in August, specializes in high-quality imagery gathered by the firm’s satellites. Purchased for $500 million, Google said at the time the satellites would eventually be used to improve Internet access across the globe and as a resource for disaster relief.
Skybox for Good allows Google to work with said non-profit parties to help save lives, protect the environment, promote education and have an overall positive impact on the planet we call home.
Images provided to these parties will be publicly available for all to download under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).
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.
The initiative comes from the Google Earth Outreach team, the main goal being to give extra knowledge and resources to nonprofit organizations that need help in telling their stories or achieving their intended missions.
