Google Maps and Google Earth are by no means the showroom from which customers of DigitalGlobe and GeoEye make their evaluations about the quality of satellite image products. Users are significantly more sophisticated than that.
Google pays for a basic level of image processing. The satellite companies are going to provide what their customer asks for and pays for. Google isn't going to pay for them to correct for every spatial and spectral distortion over millions of square miles of data, when Google is then going to give the data away.
As far as the validity of the explanation, it is well understood by experts in remote sensing, and the multitude of examples argues convincingly against the suggestion put forth in the report.
I really dont know what I am talking about, but I would assume that if your company produced satellite images, you would make pretty sure that any image artifacts were removed from your pictures before you released them. This is their 'shop window' and as any other shop window is extremely important in order to get future orders.
These sites are an illustration of similar effects found in other Google images, but is there a link to an authority site which gives information about imaging artifacts produced by the satellite companies? That would be interesting if there were.
Reproducing comments from Mars Anomaly Research guestbook for posterity and archiving.
Nothing weird going on here. No new technology. No low-flying super secret aircraft. Search Google for 'Google Earth' and 'aircraft' and you'll find a ton of images and web sites devoted to catching planes in flight. And the blue "shadow" is common. It's found in images from DigitalGlobe and is an artifact of the image acquisition process of the satellite and the aircraft motion. See the following sites . . . http://drobicho.com/blog/2009/02/google_earth_aircraft_in_fligh.html . . . http://www.ursispaltenstein.ch/blog/weblog.php?/weblog/all_aircraft_in_flight/ . . . http://lenss.nl/2009/02/google-earth-libcrypto-crash/ . . . http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2006/06/kc135_caught_re.html . . . all are examples showing the same effect. Case solved.
