Satellite scheduling system using crowd-sourced data

A system for using crowd-sourced data to automatically generate an image acquisition request for a satellite scheduling system, the system comprising:

• a computing device;
• a network input/output device configured to retrieve over a network crowd-sourced data from one or more data sources;
• a crowd-sourced data analysis module configured to use the computing device to:
• analyze the crowd-sourced data to determine an event of interest;
• determine a geographic location for the event of interest using the crowd-sourced data;
• and
• create an image acquisition request comprising the determined geographic location of the event of interest and a task priority;
• and
• a machine-to-machine interface configured to automatically provide the image acquisition request to the satellite scheduling system.

A system for scheduling events for imaging satellites, the system comprising:

• non-transitory data storage configured to store crowd-sourced data related to events;
• and
• a physical computing system in communication with the non-transitory data storage, the physical computing system configured to:
• analyze the crowd-sourced data for trends indicating one or more socially significant events;
• determine a geographic location for each of the socially significant events;
• determine a degree of relevance for each of the socially significant events;
• create an image acquisition task, wherein the image acquisition task comprises at least (1) the determined geographic location corresponding to one or more of the socially significant events and (2) a task priority based at least in part on the determined degree of relevance for the one or more socially significant events;
• and
• provide the image acquisition task to a scheduling system associated with the imaging satellites, the scheduling system operable to generate for the imaging satellites a schedule of tasks which includes at least the image acquisition task.

A method for generating an image acquisition request, the method performed under control of a crowd-sourcing system comprising computing hardware including one or more physical processors, the method comprising:

• analyzing crowd-sourced data to determine a location of an event of interest;
• ranking the event of interest;
• creating an image acquisition request comprising the determined location and the ranking of the event of interest;
• and
• providing via a machine-to-machine interface the image acquisition request to a scheduling system,
• wherein the event of interest is determined and the image acquisition request is provided to the scheduling system without intervening input from a user.