Some time ago, I was watching the discovery channel with my father. There was a show about the declassification of a top-secret satellite. My dad says "Oh, I guess I can talk with you about this now."
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.
Huge props to your dad. Skunk Works (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works) was where the SR-71 Blackbird was born. From an aviation/engineering perspective it'd be hard to find a better job
Funny, and somewhat related. A lot of the materials work for the Skunk Works projects (and some of their own) occurred at a small division of the Lockheed facility in Marietta, GA. My great uncle worked there, and used to provide me with copies of a publication called "Lockheed Horizons", which I would devour at every opportunity. He told me that the name given to the top secret development division was "Possum Works".
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.
I'm not even sure it was wise for his dad to disclose information, even if it was on the Discovery Channel. Just because something goes public, it doesn't excuse you from your obligations.
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.
Where do you think he'd get the schematics from? I can't imagine they would ever leave the secure vault - declassification doesn't mean releasing to the public domain.
> Surely he has them on some thumb drive with other keepsakes in the attic or something.
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.
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.
That's for HEXAGON, the large-scale panoramic system. The KH-8 GAMBIT system--also declassified last week--had a substantially better ground resolution than that (think inches, not feet).
We'll have to wait until some GAMBIT imagery is released before we know for sure -- and it sounds like the NGA isn't terribly enthusiastic about big data releases right now. But if the best practical resolution is no better than HEXAGON could achieve, I do wonder why they went on flying HEXAGON and GAMBIT in parallel (and, indeed, why they substantially upgraded the GAMBIT optics between KH-7 and KH-8).
"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."
There is no reading automobile license plates from space (a common misleading claim about spy satellites since the 1960s) at that resolution, not to mention that the viewing angle is all wrong for that. Thanks for sharing the photo to add an example to this discussion.
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.
I worked for a couple of nefarious organisations over the years.
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.
The optical equipment I work with has improved so much since the 70s that I find it hard to believe spy sat technology has not.
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 think the limiting factor is the air, not the lens. That's why astronomers put telescopes in space (to avoid the air completely), or use a huge array of cameras and postprocess it.
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.
Just like you can link a bunch of smaller telescopes on the ground to compensate for air distortion and get a significantly higher resolution, it should be possible to do the same with a bunch of satellites looking down.
But then you have to deal with parallax from nearby objects on the ground. That would limit its usefulness in hilly, mountainous or urban environments.
That's something computers are really, really good at.
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.
U-2s are still in use, though they're in the process of phasing them out. They are still being used in a recon role (though no longer the same way as in the Cold War). They can still fly higher than Global Hawks, and there still aren't -that- many Global Hawks around.
It's easier just to jam the satellites directly instead of shooting them down. In the case of anything less than a full-on shooting war it leads to much less diplomatic trouble as well.
In black and white, the GeoEye-1 satellite is capable of resolving objects on the ground as small as 16 inches. Average Joes like us don't see this imagery; it's sold to USG, while companies like Google are required to buy lower quality output.
That said, the "nefarious organizations" have satellites that can do amazing things...
UAVs get a lot more mileage than manned surveillance craft. Cheaper, smaller, fly lower, greatly reduced crew risk, and ability to swap out crew mid-flight.
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.
Am I understanding this correctly that you're saying there is no equipment today that can take pictures at a better resolution than 1 pixel = 0.6 meter? Because even Google Earth does better than that, so I must be misunderstanding you.
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?
A resolution of 2 to 3 feet means that features as small as 2 to 3 feet across can be distinguished, regardless of sensor technology. This is different from saying "2 to 3 feet per pixel" because the resolution of the lens and atmosphere may be worse than the resolution of the image sensor or film.
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.
2-3 feet per pixel. Google earth uses that for imaging at very high scales. They use aerial photography for the rest. Per-pixel, it's definitely mainly aerial photography TBH.
what about fusing more than one lens? isn't the issue with resolution essentially one of variance, so by using a second, independent lens, one should be able to improve resolution by a factor of two or sqrt(two)? (not that it's so simple; registration must be a pain.)
I'm not sure about its space applications, but synthetic aperture radar has improved shockingly (I don't use the term lightly) over the past couple decades.
Yes it has but "it ain't that good". There's a lot of RF noise up there, so they still use air-based platforms such as Raytheon ASTOR/Sentinel. They're cheaper as well, even if you need a couple of Tornados to follow it.
I'm not saying any more otherwise I'll probably get bagged and tagged.
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.