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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Considering that some individual NRO launches have had budgetary costs of $900m to $1.1bn for a single satellite and launch vehicle, it would be fascinating to know what kind of technology they're dealing with today. Lots of rumors about KH-11s and Misty, not much concrete info, for obvious reasons (it's all TS and codeword and higher).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen

A few years back an unused mirror assembly that was near identical to Hubble was declassified.

https://www.americaspace.com/2012/06/06/top-secret-kh-11-spy...

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...

Consider that the NRO very likely has at least a dozen superior to Hubble spy satellites orbiting as we speak.

This must be one of the purest apples to pears comparison I've seen: comparing two similar looking things intended to do completely different things and declaring one superior to the other without any hesitation, surely this is the very ur-form of the expression?

What capabilities will those (supposedly) satellites have ? read the small handwriting on the shopping list I have made through the apartment window at night ?

Keep in mind the Airy disk limit 1.22λ/d. Unless you're doing optical interferometry between satellites, 100mm resolution from 100km altitude, 1 microradian, requires an aperture about 800'000 wavelengths across. For blue light, that's a 300-mm-wide telescope; doable, although getting the optics to be that good is a serious challenge, motion blur is another issue, and such small sensor pixels don't get many photons and can be noisy. Now if you want to get to 10mm resolution, you need a 3-meter aperture; 1mm, like you're suggesting, requires 30 meters. These are much more challenging to launch.

There are some interesting things you can do with indirect light, but so far they don't help with this.

I saw something once that explained how the powerful magnification seems silly until you account for the angles that things are at.

The example they used was that license plates are vertical so to read them the satellite can't be directly above the car so it's actually a much further distance and greater magnification is necessary because of the atmosphere and the distortion of reading something at an angle.

More that the satellites are in fixed orbits that are relatively low (250 km) and moving at thousands of km per second. Even if the target is directly below them, they need to rotate quite a lot to see it for more than a few seconds at a time. If the target isn't directly below, they need to look much farther sideways than down.

Slight typo there: "thousands of km per second", you probably meant "thousands of meters per second". Low orbit is on the order of 7-8 km/s. I did find the typo humorous.

most spy satellites aren't geostationary?

No.

Perhaps SAR with very high resolution too - allowing them to image at night and through cloud cover.

The picture Trump tweeted was from a satellite with a resolution of at least 4 inches. They can definitely see your cell phone, but they can't read it- at least not from space.

Donald Trump already tweeted a supposedly classified spy satellite image taken from what is apparently one of those KH-11 sats:

https://www.wired.com/story/trump-tweeted-a-sensitive-photo-...

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