The Spring 2014 class of Hackbright Academy engineering fellows visited Skybox Imaging's Mountain View office on Tuesday for a field trip.

Hackbright alum Danielle Levi showed us around the Skybox Imaging offices -- from the clean room to mission control where we watched all the telemetry and spectral analysis charts bounce around in Chrome web browsers in many monitors. We met and talked to engineers in various parts of Skybox's offices to learn about satellites, CNC machines, data collection and the cool things that can be done with Skybox's data. In the parking lot, we saw SkyGarden (pictured) -- a former Skybox Hackday project!

Have you ever imagined what it's like to shoot something you made in your lab out into space to collect images and videos from all around the world? We heard about the speed, cost and resolution of the images and video being collected by the Skybox Imaging satellites -- and we imagined the possibilities. We stood in the mission control room watching dashboards run in countless Chrome browsers, and listened to a satellite flight controller talk about what was on the screens. We stood in the lab and breathed in the hum of machines, talked to an engineer about the CNC machine and peered at the clean room with a satellite ("SkySat-2") in it.

Thanks to Skybox Imaging for letting us come into the facility for a tour! We met Skybox Imaging co-founder and director of marketing Ching-Yu Hu (gave an overview of the company, which she co-founded five years ago with her classmates at Stanford) and many engaging Skybox Imaging employees along the route of the tour. We look forward to seeing Skybox Imaging at Career Day on April 8!