Very interesting. I've always wanted to tinker with satellite data for various research projects. Though one issue I generally have is that I've always found that the applications I imagine require data with more frequency than the free services like Google Maps provide.

Does anyone know of any good satellite data providers with more frequent (somewhere between bi-weekly and daily) data? I understand much of this is dependent on the nature of the project to determine what kind of satellite imagery you would need, different spectrometers at different UV ranges, different swathes, etc. but for now we'll just say something similar to the images in the article here.