[ad_1]
Friday afternoon, President Trump tweeted a photo of a carbonized launch pad at the Imam Khomeini Space Center in Iran, which had just experienced its third failed launch of the year. Iran's launching accident became public on Thursday after Planet satellite imaging company released a photo of thick black smoke floating on the launch pad.
Planet's photo is typical of most of the Earth's satellite images seen by the public – slightly grainy with just enough detail to bring out what you're looking at. But the image tweeted by Trump is a very detailed photo from an intelligence briefing: you can easily see the Arabic lettering around the launch pad, the foothills of the towers, the steps of a staircase and the posts of individual fence.
"When we saw this picture, we were blown away," says David Schmerler, a researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and the first to share Planet's photo on the Iranian launching accident with NPR. "A president who tweet national intelligence resources is a whole new level."
For many outside experts, the only thing more intriguing than the president sharing sensitive military intelligence was the mystery of the technology that had created the image. The extremely high resolution of the photo suggested that it had been taken by a drone or a plane at high altitude, which would mean that Trump had tweeted evidence that the United States violated Iran's airspace. Alternatively, the photo could have been taken by an American spy satellite, in which case Trump would have revealed the imaging capability of one of America's most advanced photorecognition reconnaissance satellites.
A few hours after Trump's tweet, a handful of amateur satellite followers had not only determined that the photo had been taken by a spy satellite, but they had also discovered which satellite had taken the picture. The culprit was USA 224, a satellite rated National Recognition Bureau launched in 2011.
USA 224 is believed to be part of the family of electro-optical surveillance satellites "KH-11", which began replacing film-based surveillance satellites in the 1970s. Almost everything about the KH satellite program It is classified, but there are clues to satellite design. For example, in 2011, NRO donated to NASA two space telescopes originally intended for reconnaissance and intended to be part of the KH-11 program. Each of the telescopes had a 2.4-meter (7.9-foot) mirror, the same size as that used in the Hubble Space Telescope. But unlike Hubble, these telescopes had to be directed towards the Earth and not towards the gap.
In theory, KH-11 satellites equipped with a 2.4-meter mirror could take pictures with a resolution of about 10 centimeters. (For comparison, higher-caliber commercial imaging satellites can reach about 25 centimeters.) This is pure speculation because satellite images have always been classified. The only confirmed photos of a KH-11 satellite were leaked in 1984 by a naval intelligence analyst who ended up serving a two-year prison sentence for espionage.
"The US DoD has repeatedly released reconnaissance satellite images, but in any case, it was deliberately degraded images," says Marco Langbroek, an archaeologist who runs a satellite tracking station. amateur spying in the Netherlands and that helped determine the country. took the picture. "It's the first time since the 1984 leak that an image with this level of detail was published."
Tracing the photo on a classified satellite was a master class in Internet search. Christiaan Triebert, journalist at New York Times & # 39; visual investigation team, used the shadows of the photo to determine a window of one hour in which the photo was taken. Michael Thompson, graduate student in astrodynamics at Purdue University, highlighted USA 224 was directly above the Iranian launch base during the period identified by Triebert. Langbroek then used these initial observations to perform a fine analysis providing an exact location of the satellite at the time of the photo.
[ad_2]
Source link