Narrator: This is Science Today. High-resolution satellite images, which were previously prohibitively expensive - are now available to U.S. universities, thanks to a public-private partnership between the University of California , Santa Barbara and Terra Image USA. David Siegel directs the university's Institute for Computational Earth System Science, which is the lead university institute involved in the partnership.

Siegel: Traditionally, academic users - especially in the U.S. - have had no access to these data. And this is one of these great opportunities that we can change the face of science.

Narrator: High-resolution satellite images can be used by researchers working on earth remote sensing to track all sorts of changes in land use - both natural and man-made, as well as to study plate tectonics and coastal resources.

Siegel: There's hundreds of hundreds of applications. This data set is a constellation of satellites up in space of the SPOT system and the satellites themselves are owned by CNES, which is the French version of NASA.

Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.