Declassified US Spy Satellites Reveal Rare Look at Secret Cold War Space Program
space.com
space.com
Turns out he had been working on top-secret satellites in Lockheed Martin in a secure place called the skunk-projects (he had to work in a full on sealed vault. Maybe it was called skunk-works. I don't quite remember the name).
Anyway, interesting and funny conversations followed.
Do you really think that that's how folks (who aren't ex-Clinton officials, that is, Sandy Berger) handle classified materials? Hint - they don't take them home as keepsakes. They'd go to jail for that, or less.
I worked on TS stuff and would see highly-classified stuff in Janes publications all the time. These days, I see a lot of (perhaps formerly) very classified stuff on Wikipedia, Google and so on.
Summary: Always keep your mouth shut.
You know there are lots of books on this topic that might feed some interesting conversations with your dad?
I recently read Skunkworks, and there was a lot of info on the politics involved, and the fights between the spy plane guys and the satellite guys. One defining incident being the shoot down of Gary Powers in his U2 severely embarrassing the US government.
According to documents released by the NRO, each HEXAGON satellite mission lasted about 124 days, with the satellite launching four film return capsules that could send its photos back to Earth. An aircraft would catch the return capsule in mid-air by snagging its parachute following the canister's re-entry.
And that was in the 70s, imagine what stuff they've got up there right now!
I doubt there is nothing much greater in resolution. There are so many technical challenges such as diffusion due to moisture in the atmosphere that limit things practically. The resolution is basically shite from space. Certain non-visible light bandwidth applications are better as they don't suffer from the same effects however they have to then deal with cosmic radiation (which is terrible apparently) and corresponding gaps in the magnetosphere which screw up the equipment.
It's a bit hit and miss really and costs lots of money for no real good.
If they had anything significantly better, they'd have decommissioned all the Lockheed U2's by now.
I am not sure that the U2 is still used for surveillance. I think it is now used for research purposes. The much more modern Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird has been retired. Either the DoD is relying on sats or UAVs or the rumored next-gen spy plane is deployed [0]
Even if sats can take hi-res photos, there are still plenty of good reasons to use spy planes. Capturing visible light from space only works if the target area is not covered in cloud, spy sats are very hard to hide (it can be done in the short term but amateurs eventually find them) and they can be shot down (in a war with China, you bet the spy sat will be knocked out within hours of the first hostilities), spy planes can carry SIGINT gear as well.
That said, there are plenty of good reasons not to use spy planes and rely solely on sat intel. If you plane crashes it is a diplomatic and technological disaster. Unlike the stealth Blackhawk crash at Bin Laden's compound, spy planes don't carry a squad of seals equipped with C4 to destroy the valuable top secret technology.
I'd expect the big gains are in stitching together lots of signals, possibly over time, and extracting interesting features automatically. I'd think resolving stuff over time can only be done if you already know what you are looking for (to avoid massive dimensionality problems), or for static features. Still, that's an interesting subset.
The cameras don't have to be too widely separated. A little time and space helps a lot. The main problem is that this reduces your areal coverage as you're dedicating multiple sensors to a single sensing target.
Related: what am I misunderstanding when people talk about "satellites had a resolution of about 2 to 3 feet" and I think it's nonsense? How can a 'resolution' be '2 to 3 feet' - isn't resolution always something per something else - amount of detail you can represent onto another display surface? What part is implied here that I'm missing?
Consider a <$100 consumer digital camera with a hypothetical 12MP sensor (4000x3000 resolution). Suppose you point the camera at a 40' by 30' wall with a highly detailed pattern. Though the actual sensor resolution to wall resolution would be 0.01' per pixel, due to various optical distortions (and possibly the Bayer filter on the sensor), the effective resolution could be closer to 0.05'. Thus, any element of the pattern printed on the wall that was smaller than 0.05' would be unresolvable.
That said, the "nefarious organizations" have satellites that can do amazing things...
I'm not saying any more otherwise I'll probably get bagged and tagged.
Particularly interesting now are smaller drones -- from the size of typical hobbyist RC planes to insect-size micro-drones useful for surveillance in highly localized areas or inside buildings.
Eye-in-the-sky was really useful when we didn't have a good idea of where on Earth things were (the US made significant "corrections" to Soviet-era maps of central Asia in the 1950s and 60s). While they're useful to keep tabs on things, high-value surveillance tends to be more localized and focused.
"The KH-9 would image a wide swath of terrain, later scrutinized by imagery analysts on the ground for so-called ‘targets of opportunity.' Once these potential targets were identified, a KH-8 would then be maneuvered to photograph the location in much higher resolution."
This is "0.5m" resolution (from GeoSat-1).
http://geoeyemediaportal.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/images/gall...
As several comments above have pointed out, Google Maps misleads the public by referring to aerial photos taken from airplanes as a "satellite" view of the ground. Studying imagery of my own neighborhood on Google Maps makes clear that the images at close-in views must come from airplanes. The particular walking path I take from my house to the local public library is very clearly visible, but again there is no hope of reading automobile license plates from those photographs.