What a tweet tells us about spy satellites [video] (opens in new tab)

The resolution of this satellite is about 5-7 cm per pixel which is about the limit of what's possible with the 2.4m mirror it uses. You'd need a mirror at least 10x as large to read license plates, and that's if they were pointing upward.

This is anecdotal, and no idea how real it is, but my dad flew reconnaissance for the USAF in the 70s and claimed to have the capability to read license plates way back then from very high altitude (no idea what qualified as very high altitude, but assumed they were not easily detected from the ground).

I'm of the understanding that this was not a single image, but a composite image, taking by different satellites, planes, and/or drones.

The US could have build test facilities in their deserts, have a 3-D model available for proper reconstruction, and then learn to stitch and skew back all imagery into a single composite image. There may even be some "filling in" or "sharpening" of pixels or textures that could not be observed, but are guessed from their context.

In the framework of composite imagery, it would indeed be possible to zoom in, until you get to camera's capturing road traffic (maybe the license plate was not observed in the moment the main photo was taken, but was remembered from an observation by traffic camera 30 minutes ago and stitched back onto the object: composite imagery through time).

Finally, you could use multiple non-image sources for the composition. If three (ground) sensors capture the noise, heat, or vibrations from a train on a train track, you can now triangulate and draw the location of that train on space photos at a timestamp of your choosing.

Viewing a license place it not the same as reading it.

The black box on the top left? I'm assuming that's just redacting the classification level, which was surely Top Secret.

The top left would have been information about the picture. Time/Date and source.

I agree that Trump "probably didn't just snap and post". His Twitter account has always been shared between Trump personally and his staff. Frankly, calmly sharing facts and evidence like this is 180° from the pattern of Trump's more impulsive tweets.

Edit: Furthermore, Trump's personal phone is an Android, and this particular tweet was from iPhone.

The really astounding part of all this is that hobbyists have been monitoring the exact orbits of all the US spy satellites for years. They know exactly where they're overhead and when. That kind of capability used to be something that only a handful of states had, and now people just do it from their homes and post it to the internet.

For a bit more corroboration of that analysis, this is what SunCalc says the sun direction would be at that time (9:44:20 UTC, 14:14:20 PM local time) pinned at the base of what (i believe) is that specific launch pad. Elevation of the satellite will affect the apparent angle some, but this is pretty convincing:

https://imgur.com/bSDLBmI

Oh wow this is the coolest thing I’ve read in a while

What I got from the video is that we have hundreds of Hubbles around the Earth but only one of them is pointed outwards at the stars.

China and Russia sure, Israel perhaps. Turkey? Probably? Pakistan maybe? What about Libya, Iran, or North Korea?

Everybody knows the specifics now, and even the less well funded adversarial agencies will have a much firmer idea of just how good the adaptive optics of KH-11 are.

And what of our citizens?

The man is a legend. Really knowledgeable but fun at the same time.

He's also a DJ, I believe.

>My guess is you would assume that this capability exists.

>If I wanted to be really good, I would assume 10x this capability exists.

The video says that the quality was already at the limit that 2.4m mirrors can achieve. The fact that the spy satellites had 2.4m mirrors was already known (from hubble design documents).

So basically if you were the baddies and were preparing for the worst case scenario (as you should), you were covered. If you got lazy and didn't, it was a wake-up call.

Big difference between inferring and confirming and knowing

I believe this is the tweet from Trump:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11674933719732551...

The tweet itself is Trump twittering a picture of the launch site on a rocket in Iran.

That picture is bounced off a 2.4m mirror from nearly 400km away, calling it flawless would be an understatement!

The image has also been heavily compressed (after it was annotated), so we're looking at a very poor version of it. So yeah, bonkers is probably the best term to describe it.