Cold War Satellite Pics Declassified

wwwssabbsdotcom writes "Looks like 25 years ago, we were taking pretty good B&W pics of the rest of the world, interesting story. How about those Cuban Missile Crisis pics, do they have that roll available?"

Comments

Cuban Pics

[Karamchand]

Though there are probably satellite pictures of those missile bases on Cuba they were discovered from a plane.

Here are the images you wanted

[ekrout]

http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/u-2a/u-2_62_cuba_mi ssile_base.htm

Re:Might as well say it....

[CBackSlash]

Maybe you can already.

ho hum....

[Anonymous Coward]

*Mozilla 1.0+, Netscape 6.0, and Netscape 7.0 uses the JAVA 2 Virtual Machine which does not support the original Java applet security model used with EarthExplorer applets.
**EarthExplorer will not currently work with Macintosh systems due to the following:

1. IE and the Microsoft Virtual Machine does not support LiveConnect for Macintosh systems.
2. Old versions of the Java Virtual Machine (Netscape 4.6 and earlier) do not support LiveConnect for Macintosh systems.
3. The Java 2 Virtual Machine does not support the original Java applet security model EarthExplorer uses.
4. Signed secure applets don't communicate properly through LiveConnect when using the JAVA 2 Virtual Machine on a Macintosh. See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=160274 for more information.

Macintosh users may search for many of the same products at: http://edc.usgs.gov/webglis. You can also access EarthExplorer using the PC emulation package "Virtual PC" if you have this installed on your system

Re:Interesting....

[mblumber]

This joke is overused, and you used it incorrectly because you don't understand it.

The reference is to "Underpants Gnomes" (a South Park episode) where a bunch of gnomes steal Tweak's underpants. Their business plan is as follows:

1. Steal underpants.
2. ????
3. Profit! ...and so now you see how this often related to the .com's back a few years ago, but how your "conspiracy theory" list doesn't make any sense.

Slash and Dotted

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no problems visiting a site that is being slashdotted. Normally, I can just go back a few hours later and look. But Today, the link on Earth Explorer was acually loading. So I decided to throw it in a tab and browser the rest some other sites.

A few minutes later I check back to the Earth Explorer site to find a very ugly message that was taking forever to load: "EarthExplorer has failed to start because it has detected that your browser does not meet the requirements necessary to run EarthExplorer. Please download a compatible version by clicking one of the buttons below."

100cm

[wiredog]

That's 1 meter. IIRC, the French satellite has 1 meter resolution in the visible light bands. I think the latest Landsats are that good.

Re:100cm

[MtViewGuy]

If I remember correctly, the resolution of SPOT (launched by the French) had a resolution of 10 meters in general. The current Landsat has a resolution around 5 meters, if I remember correctly. For many commercial imaging satellites, very high resolution is not really necessary because they're designed to cover wide areas for environmental research.

It was only after IKONOS became operational in the late fall of 1999 that commercial imaging satellites reached the 100 cm resolution level. You'll see a lot more 100 cm resolution imaging satellites from multiple companies in the coming years--several American and several European companies are designing such satellites now. We may see commercial imaging satellites capable of imaging down to 50 cm very soon.

Re:Whose looking in your window?

[silas_moeckel]

Granted lets not talk about the hubble specificaly but as I used to work with Satalite GIS data trust me you can tell if somebody is reading a newspaper especialy if you have a few offset shots to interpalate. The russians sold us (for whatever reasons in the mid 90's US sat data was classified but the russians would shoot you just about anything for a few hundred bucks) good half meter res sat photos you could tell if the women sunbathing in there back yards had there bikini tops on or not (this is black and white remember) All of this was from russian declasified sat data so we would have to assume ther clasified ones are better (maybe not film has the problem of being consumable and having to be retrieved digital might not give the rez but a constant stream of pictures instead) Now we are 10 years later while I boubt they can head the newspaper over your head of if they would even want to but make and modle of your car not a problem.

USGS web page: Gale Norton strikes again!

[mfago]

As mentioned in another post, the USGS webpage itself is unusable unless you're running Netscape 4 (windows or linux only) or IE for Windows.

I think it would be a good idea for as many people as possible to emailthe maintainer of the web page.

Unsurprising for the gov't to so thouroughly screw-up like this, especially with Interior Secretary Gale Norton at the helm. FWIW, she is facing contempt of court charges for lying in Federal court during a trial of gross mismanagement of the Native American Trust fund. Mismanagement by completely failing to secure a computer system...

Hell, why don't we all email Gale herself?!

Re:Whose looking in your window?

[Anonymous Coward]

To add to parent: And with fine enough infrared sensativity to locate people and warm objects in a house, through the house.

Re:Whose looking in your window?

[phil reed]

Here's an older DejaView message on the topic. It addresses this very issue.

Undergraduate physics:

Resolving power R (resolution) of a diffraction limited telescope: R = wavelength/(2*diameter telescope)

This means for the HST (2.4 meter) and visual wavelenght (500nm) R = 500nm/4.8m = 1*10^(-7)

Since the Hubble is in orbit h = 680km (380 miles) high, this means it can theoretically resolve: Detail = R * h = 0.07. Thus 7cm (3 inch) details. Not enuff for reading license plates, even if someone would hold it up to the sky so we dont have inclination effects. Besides this, the best visual wavelength camera on board (the PC chip on the WFPC2 camera) UNDERsamples this signal by a factor of 2 giving an effective resolution of 14cm (1/2 feet).

This holds only if we ignore atmospheric turbulence effects (which certainly DONT average out), the pointing instability (up to about 10mas (micro-arcseconds)) and thermal breathing (up to 10mas). This degrades the image even further. (10mas translates to about 5cm as seen from the HST)

Furthermore, target acquisition is problematic. HST uses guide-stars, which need to be in the field of view, to lock on targets. Certainly no stars available on the face of the earth ;-p. Even then: A quote from the HST data hanbook: "It is also possible to take observations (primarily WFPC2 "snapshot" exposures) without guide stars, using only gyro pointing control. The absolute pointing accuracy using gyros is about 14" (one sigma), and the pointing drifts at a rate of 1.4 +/- 0.7 mas s**-1. "

So, we have a 66% chance of 14" (arcseconds) acquisition accuracy. This translates to about 1400 pixels offset (if we were well sampled) on a ccd camera or 100m inaccuracy on the ground.

Say we want a spy satellite with 1cm resolution (ignoring degrading affects) on orbit 300km high (if lower, atmospheric friction would cause it to fall back to the earth), then applying the same formulae as above we would need a telescope diameter of roughly 5 meters. (According the the space shuttle reference guide you would have to keep the payload doors open in flight to make it fit, hehehe)

Conclusion:

IMBO the NSA cant read license plates. The technology for space telescopes with this capability is only now being developed (look for NGST on the web) against HUGE costs, certainly not within the NSA's budget. Besides target acquisition is a severe limitation, and it's role becomes more important when the resolution increases.

just my $0.02

Yup, the film was Kodak film -- no kidding

[Buran]

Actually, the Corona program did use Kodak film. Due to static problems with early film (which caused arcing on the exposed negatives), Kodak developed polymer-based film.

I work in an electron microscopy lab and the film used for the EM systems is Kodak 4489 "ESTAR Thick Base" -- which means that my paychecks depend directly on something that was developed for use in space. (As a space buff -- Buran is/was the Soviet space shuttle -- I'm quite pleased with that situation.) A spinoff, as they're commonly called.

The EM film is mounted on metal plates for exposing and when developed yields 8cmx10cm transparencies using Kodak D-19 developer. For Corona, the exposed film was placed in a reentry capsule which parachuted back to earth and was retrieved midair by a C-119 Flying Boxcar aircraft. It doesn't take that long to develop at all and can be ready for analysis the same day.

According to the Kodak EM film page:

"KODAK Electron Micrography Film 4489 has approximately half the speed of KODAK Electron Image Film SO-163 film, but exhibits less curl and shorter pump-down times. Coated on a 7mils Estar support, KODAK Electron Microscope Film offers exceptional dimensional stability and eliminates the use of traditional glass support products."

We are still using film because (1) electron microscopes are very expensive, so ours are from the mid-1970s, (2) it's not that easy to retrofit them, at least as far as I understand it, for full digital, and (3) it's not all that hard to put the negatives on a lightbox and shoot them with a professional digital SLR, which is how we get the images into computers for processing. And, of course, (4) digital camera technology still hasn't beat out film for quality yet, though we're hoping to get a Canon EOS-1Ds soon that will start to close the quality gap.

(The film is kept in a vacuum once in the microscope -- something else which I'm sure was a benefit for Corona.)

If you want to see some sample EM images taken with the Kodak film, see our lab's image gallery. Don't bother with Kodak's sample images, they suck. ;)

I'm pretty sure that Kodak also designed the Corona camera system, though I'm not certain who the actual builder was.

Panoramic Imagery

[briancnorton]

This is all great and all, but I have worked with corona imagery (after 1996) and it's REALLY hard to use.

First of all, the imagery is not vertical, it's panoramic. Great for intel agencies, not so great for mapping. It's almost impossible to orthographically rectify, and hence use for anything useful. The resolution of the film is very good. It's something like 150 lp/mm, and the stereo is very good, but it's a pain in the butt to do panoramic stereo without special equipment.

second, geo-referencing was accomplished in a brilliant, if arcane way. A second camera was involved that took pictures of the stars 180 away from the image. To find out what the picture is of, you need starcharts and a lot of math to figure out what stars you are looking at, where the satellite was, and what the picture is of. The equipment to do this in a useful environment is VERY expensive.

third, it's panchromatic and not IR sensitive. You can see some ground features, but nothing environmental, and not all that much of historical significance. Consequently, the imagery has not been used for as much as had been hoped.

Re:Hello, this is the US, Israel's bitch.

[lemkebeth]

You wrote:

Israel is quite fine with fighting, they took over Palestine, part of Egypt, the Golan Heights (they still occupy the Golan Heights and Palestine)

I feel compelled to point out that Britain gave Palestine for the new Israel. Palestine was British controlled

Working site

[tevman]

http://edc.usgs.gov/webglis

this is the site w/o java issues