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In Egypt, I do survey work on the ground. That's really the most important part of using satellite images. You know, it helps us to find potential locations for sites, and then we get to go there on the ground and confirm what we've seen.

We're using satellites to help map and model cultural features that could never be seen on the ground because they're obscured by modernization, forests, or soil.

Our intention and aspiration is to continue building out thematic information about every subject - basemaps, imagery, demographics, landscape data, etc. - so anyone can use it to access thousands of authoritative maps.

Scientists use satellites to track weather, map ice sheet melting, detect diseases, show ecosystem change... the list goes on and on. I think nearly every scientific field benefits or could benefit from satellite imagery analysis.

Archaeologists use datasets from NASA and commercial satellites, processing the information using various off-the-shelf computer programs. These datasets allow us to see beyond the visible part of the light spectrum into the near, middle, and far infrared.

Once you digitize data, you can actually analyze patterns and relationships in geographic space - relationships between certain health patterns and air or water pollution, between plants and climate, soils, landscape.

Satellite imagery is the only way we can map the looting patterns effectively.

So much of the physical world has been explored. But the deluge of data I get to investigate really lets me chart new territory. Genetic data from people living today forms an archaeological record of what happened to their ancestors 10,000 years ago.

While data can only tell you what has happened in the past, it can in some ways give you a sense of what might be of interest to an audience in the future.