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

Whose looking in your window?

[Havoc'ing]

If you figure we can view a galaxy a bizzillion miles away through the hubble just imagine what we are capable of now right in our back yard. And the hubble aint even classified.

Re:Whose looking in your window?

[phil reed]

just imagine what we are capable of now right in our back yard.

Not as much as you might imagine. A Hubble-sized telescope in orbit at Hubble's altitude, pointed straight down, can resolve down to 15 centimeters. That would be enough to tell that you drive a Honda instead of a Surburban, but it couldn't tell much beyond that.

Re:Whose looking in your window?

[mesocyclone]

Problems with this analysis:

1) Id doesn't take into account any electronic processing of resulting signals or using multiple images taken seconds apart to achieve higher resolution.

2) Optical spy satellites are likely to use multiple mirrors, both to use adaptive optics to adjust for atmospheric turbulence, and to avoid the problem of fit in the shuttle payload.

I believe it is the Keck telescope (which has adaptive optics) that has resolution sufficient to read a license plate from much higher orbits (all other caveats apply).

A little tidbit... the Multiple-Mirror Telescope (MMT) on Mt. Hopkins, Arizona used to be (and may still be) owned by the airport. When it was built, it was built with an azimuth/elevation mount, rather than the usual polar mount, and used a computer steering system that was accurate enough to account for minute flexing in the very rigid metal frame.

The mirrors were Air-Force surplus from the spy satellite program.

The Air-Force used to "borrow" the scope from time to time. The Az-El mount was probably chosen to allow tracking of earth orbiting objects - Russian satellites.

The spook folks work with very impressive technology. They are bound by the laws of physics, but they probably have engineering tricks that the public world has not heard of. Tricks in signal processing, adaptive optics in space, ultra-precision pointing, etc.

Actually, if you just solve the problem of taking current earth borne adaptive optics telescopes into orbit, you can pretty well achieve the resolution you want.

And then, of course, there is synthetic aperture radar. Synthetic aperture is a mathematical technique for creating a synthetic (virtual) antenna of very long length (very high resolution in one dimension) along the motion of the radar. Simple radar has, of course, much lower resolution than optics for the same size antenna, due to the much longer wavelength. But when you extend the antenna for hundreds or thousands of meters through synthetic aperture magic, that resolution gets very good.

And then, of course, we can speculate about Lidar. I have no idea what the spooks may do with that.

I think the problem of resolution is no longer of significance to the spook business. The bigger problems are areal coverage, data reduction and storage, and concealment.

Interesting, somewhat related

[Anonymous Coward]

While working at nasa, a co-worker told me this story once:
Apparently in the 80's, he had been working on a satellite which contained a sensor to measure ground temperatures. The contractors who were working on the image processing for the data were so far behind, that the program would not be ready until a couple months after the satellite launch (a major PR disaster - no pretty pictures for the public to see!). So he was put on a crack team to hack something together that would be ready by launch time. What they ended up putting together was better than the specs. So the satellite launched and they got back the pictures and saw alot of interesting things... Like, gee, what's that underground hot spot in Nevada, and so on and so forth... So they were all pleased with themselves until the Feds came, classified their program and all the images, dumped all their equipment in a truck, and drove off.. I guess this shows why it is never better to do more than "government work" :)

Re:Cuban Pics

[meringuoid]

Yes, the intelligence pics that proved the Soviets had missiles in Cuba were taken by U2 spy planes. They were published immediately - if you're trying to force the Russians to remove their missiles, you don't keep it a secret that you know about the missiles. You tell the world.

In the early sixties, satellite reconaissance was primitive - it was still at the stage of ejecting the film in a little capsule to be picked up on the ground :-) Planes were getting much better material then.

The probable limit of spysats

[MtViewGuy]

I think the practical limit for today's KH-11 and newer spysats is about 6-7 cm resolution, not enough to read a newspaper headline but definitely good enough to tell what kind of vehicle you're looking at.

Remember, even at 100 cm resolution the IKONOS satellite is capable of showing some amazing images. Remember that IKONOS image of the North Korean rocket test facility?

I expect within the next 4-5 years several companies will be orbiting imaging satellites capable of resolution at 100 cm resolution. It'll be nearly impossible to hid any secret activity with that type of resolution.

KH-9, Big Bird

[wiredog]

It was the last of the bucket droppers. An interesting book, if you can find it, is Deep Black. It's a history of overhead imaging from the Civil War through the KH-11 program, including the U-2 and SR-71 aircraft.

My father worked for the Defense Mapping Agency (the predecessor of NIMA) until 89 and he was surprised at some of the things that showed up in that book. Especially that the resolution of the KH-11 (best is 2.5 inches, so it can't read license plates) and KH-9 (9 inches) were in there.