I really love both maps and images of Earth from space, so when I learned this week of MapBox's plan to deliver satellite imagery that is just hours old from all over the planet, I thought they must have done this just for me.

They didn't, but I am really excited about this. Here's why: A major barrier between the average person and satellite data is the ability to process that data and turn it into a usable image. MapBox intends to remove that barrier. Yesterday I talked to two of the folks behind what they are calling MapBox Satellite Live.

"Let’s get the most recent imagery possible out there," Chris Herwig, who leads the satellite team, said. "Let’s get that imagery out there in a format everyone can use that doesn’t require any specialized knowledge."

Yes, please!

Every satellite, and every sensor on those satellites collects different kinds of data in different wavelengths and has to be processed differently. This requires math and algorithms and software and skills, and probably other stuff too – the kind of things individuals, small businesses and organizations (and even most large businesses and organizations) and many academic institutions just don't have. So, to get beautiful, useful and useable images, most people have to depend on others to do the work, often at considerable expense.

"If you’re a mid-size farm co-op, you don’t have a GIS person. If you are a three-person NGO, you don’t have a GIS person," MapBox imagery specialist Charlie Loyd said.

Even government imagery that is freely available, such as that from the Landsat mission, isn't easy for the average person to use.

"It just takes a lot of work and a lot of sensor-specific knowledge," Herwig told me. "Take away the barriers, and this imagery becomes really, really valuable."

This is the impetus behind MapBox Satellite Live, which will be in beta soon for a few users and available for you sometime this fall if all goes well. Basically, MapBox will be your GIS person. Herwig says the plan is to make ready-to-go processed imagery available for purchase on an image-by-image basis to people with MapBox accounts (signing up is free), the same way songs are available to people with iTunes accounts.

And these images will be fresh. How fresh? Their goal is to have images all over the globe available six hours after they're acquired. Unless you're the CIA or NSA or the military, six hours is practically real-time in the realm of Earth from space. The key is knowing how to process the images in a really quick way that can scale up – something the MapBox guys tell me they can do. If they are right, this will mean I will be able to easily get the most recent image of any spot on the globe, and so will you.

I think six hours is probably a bit ambitious, but anywhere near that will be great. Initially, the focus will be on getting images of news-worthy events ASAP. Images of things like landslides, floods, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, train crashes, oil spills and other disasters, war zones, massive protests or other gatherings, ice-shelf break-ups, etc. But the really cool stuff, in my opinion, will be the ability to track the landscape over time.

I guess it will all depend on how many satellites they can collect images from, and they aren't saying where all the imagery will come from at this point, or how much it will cost.

So who, other than satellite-image-obsessed journalists like me, will use this? I have trouble imagining who wouldn't, but some of the users Herwig imagines include staffers in Congress and other government decision makers, post-disaster emergency response teams, NGOs like Amnesty International, the agricultural sector, commodities forecasters, ship trackers, and yes, journalists.

"Imagine the level of data journalism this will make possible," Herwig said. Yep, I'm already there... mmmm, Earth from space...

Herwig and Loyd expect to be surprised by the other ways users will think to use this service. I think scientists will probably find lots of ways to use it. I bet you have already thought of more ways to use it – what are they?