These Satellite Images Document an Atrocity

He pulls one up. It could be an archaeological site: Small, round outlines mark where buildings once stood; old fence lines are still slightly visible as marks in the sand. With no context, the scene is beautiful. But with a little bit of background, it's devastating. Those small, round outlines recently were homes. The people who lived there, if still alive, are probably in refugee camps. You can see those in other images: tightly packed huts and tents that house tens of thousands of people in squalid conditions. In one image taken in February near a village called Tawila, the huts are built right up to the fence line of an African Union outpost, apparently in the hope of garnering a bit of extra protection.

BROMLEY STAYS HOME ON SUNDAY. He can log into his work computers from there; he needs a good night's sleep and some time with his dog. Nelson isn't so lucky. He hasn't taken a full day off in more than two weeks, but his work computer isn't accessible from off-site, and he has another half-dozen image pairs to analyze, so he's at the office again, though dressed down in jeans and a Nationals cap.

At midnight, Blätter calls to check in. "Oh, that's not good," she says when Nelson picks up. She's worried about the hours he's keeping, and was hoping she'd reach his voice mail. He promises to call it a night.

By Monday afternoon, the team has accomplished a lot. Blätter has made the final decisions about the threatened sites and has reviewed a thick stack of documentation on the villages that have already been attacked. Julie Flint has just returned from Chad, where she had interviewed refugees, collecting heartbreaking photos and testimonials that will humanize the satellite shots when Amnesty posts them online. Nelson's reviewing the information that will be shipped to the graphic design firm responsible for the group's Web site.

With his part of the project under control, Bromley takes a break from Darfur. Just down the hall from his office is the AAAS Burma conflict-monitoring center. Intern Sean O'Connor, a 25-year-old who's starting grad school in the fall, has a desk that is separated from the hall by a tall counter. Bromley leans on this when he stops by to discuss a package they're getting ready to send to their contacts in Thailand.

O'Connor has been working with Bromley to document the Burmese government's persecution of the Karen, an ethnic minority group that lives along the country's mountainous border with Thailand. If anything, this task has proved even more challenging than documenting the destruction in Darfur: Rather than huts in a desert, the targets are homes in a jungle, in a part of the world often hidden by clouds. But the duo has documented a number of attacks and, a few weeks ago, posted early findings on Google Earth. The activists they'd been working with were impressed but afraid that the detailed information the images provided might help the military find local hideouts. So Bromley took the files down, and now they're mailing them on a DVD, along with a paper printout of a satellite image that could be taken to a refugee camp.

"This is called participatory mapping," Bromley says. "Rather than me speculating what things are, they can say, 'Look, there's my house.'"

As the week moves on, O'Connor gets information from the Free Burma Rangers that a one-day government offensive has just burned down four Burmese villages, leaving about 1,000 people homeless. The towns are small and close to each other, so he puts in a satellite order that should encompass all four. But the formal start of the monsoon season is less than two weeks away, and cloud cover is already becoming a problem. QuickBird may not get a clear image until next week, next month -- or even in the fall, after the monsoons. By fall, any burn scars will have been overgrown by jungle. Two of the villages aren't in DigitalGlobe's library; unless new images are taken soon, there won't be evidence that they ever existed.

As O'Connor tracks the situation in Burma, the images for the at-risk Darfurian villages start to come in. It turns out that Bromley was mistaken about some images costing less than expected. But after Bromley explains the project, the company offers him a deal: For every 10 new images ordered, two additional ones will be free. The other companies Bromley works with have given him great deals on their archival images -- one has even donated some -- but this is the first break on new collections. It means the group will be able to afford to shoot most, though not all, of the threatened sites on their list.

As the first set of images from the Netherlands satellite arrives, Bromley encounters another glitch: Some aren't crisp enough. Satellite companies list the resolution their cameras get when they're pointing straight down at the ground, but satellites often end up shooting at a slight angle for speed. The larger the angle, the lower the resolution. Depending on why one wants an image, the difference may not matter. But Darfurian huts are small.

"If it's too fuzzy, we can't see if they're damaged," Bromley says.

Fortunately, the company agrees to redo the shots. The next week, those images arrive, and they're what he'd hoped for: crisp, unassailable evidence of villages that still exist -- and proof to Sudan's government that someone is watching.

NEXT: See the satellite images.

Robin Mejia writes about science, technology and people. She lives in Santa Cruz, Calif., and can be reached at mejia@nasw.org.