From satellites? I find that hard to believe, I always thought that the atmospheric distortion significantly limits the resolution of the images.
back
4 comments
That's why it was classified. Belief is irrelevant.
You can lookup keyhole imagery from the old days. Keyhole was the original codename for them.
Do you have a link? I’m curious.
Google? I think the full name was keyhole talent, but i'm not sure about the talent part anymore.
There is no mention of 'license plates' or specific resolution.
Astronomical telescopes use active mirrors for atmosphere compensations - maybe a satellite could do the same to get a clearer image, just pointing the other direction ?
It does, but it’s the kind of problem you can throw computation at, along with adaptive optics. If you remember that photo Trump released, that was from a KH-11, which launched in the 70s (Hubble reused some of the design to save money) and they it generating data in the gigabit range back then so I’d imagine they have a high enough frame rate that you could get many frames to interpolate even for a moving subject.
They pour a LOT of money into that kind of capability so I’d be hesitant to say it’s impossible 50 years later.
That picture that Donald Trump tweeted out of the failed Iranian rocket launch seemed sharp enough to make out license plates.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11674933719732551...
This seems like maybe 10cm resolution. Close but not there.
That structure seems really large. But it’s really sharp and I’d say within an order of magnitude of reading license plates. Doesn’t seem like a stretch to think they can go to higher resolutions.