The Google Maps app is seen on an Apple iPhone 4S on December 13, 2012 in Fairfax, California. (Photo : Getty Images/Justin Sullivan)
Google has updated its satellite imagery used in apps, such as Google Maps and Google Earth, to provide high-resolution super-sharp images to users.
More than a billion people use Google Maps every month, which makes it the most widely used atlas ever. Google has now given the app a brand new makeover, allowing users to see more detailed, colorful photographs of mother Earth.
The tech giant announced on its official Google Maps blog on Monday (June 27) that it had upgraded its satellite imagery to NASA's Landsat 8 satellite, which it utilizes to create a cloud-free mosaic of the world by combining satellite images to remove clouds and other weather elements and give Google Earth and Google Maps users a clear view of the planet's mountains, forests, islands and cities.
The company has updated its imagery for the first time since 2013. Earlier, Google used images from the Landsat 7 satellite, but photographs taken by the satellite were affected by a hardware failure in 2003, which caused some of Earth's locations to have diagonal gaps of missing data, according to The Verge.
However, Google had no other option but to stick with the Landsat 7 imagery as it was the best available at the time and managed to find a way to get rid of those gaps by analyzing a large number of images.
The new Landsat 8 satellite, launched in 2013, has the ability capture images with "greater detail, truer colors and at an unprecedented frequency" taking twice as many pictures as its predecessor, the company said in its statement.
The new update also features fewer clouds than before, which Google says was possible after going through petabytes of data, which is the same as 700 trillion pixels, which is 70 times more pixels than the approximate number of galaxies in the Universe or 7,000 times more pixels than there are stars in the Milky Way to put things into perspective.
"Satellite images are often cloudy, but not always over the same place, so we looked at millions of images and took the clearest pixels to stitch together this cloud-free and seamless image," the company added.
Google Maps and Earth users can now check out some of the breathtaking scenery and images by enabling the satellite layer on the app.
Check out some of the high-resolution satellite images in the video below:
