Author Topic: KH-11 KENNEN  (Read 343246 times)

Offline Blackstar

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #300 on: 12/12/2017 12:23 pm »
Taken from Blackstar’s new ‘Black ops and the Shuttle’ article on The Space Review website.

Quote
The NRO plans on declassifying information about the early KENNEN satellites early next year.)

http://thespacereview.com/article/3390/1

But I would not hold your breath...


Offline kevin-rf

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #301 on: 12/12/2017 02:38 pm »
...but, but, but..... Exhale......
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Offline Star One

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #302 on: 12/12/2017 03:04 pm »
Taken from Blackstar’s new ‘Black ops and the Shuttle’ article on The Space Review website.

Quote
The NRO plans on declassifying information about the early KENNEN satellites early next year.)

http://thespacereview.com/article/3390/1

But I would not hold your breath...

D’oh!!!

Offline Blackstar

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #303 on: 12/12/2017 05:09 pm »
...but, but, but..... Exhale......

In June 2016 I was informed that the SIGINT material would be released in October 2016. It was released in November 2017.

Offline Star One

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #304 on: 12/12/2017 07:05 pm »
...but, but, but..... Exhale......

In June 2016 I was informed that the SIGINT material would be released in October 2016. It was released in November 2017.

Do you know if all they were referring to has now been released or do you speculate there’s more to come, knowing how they seem to release these things in bits?

Offline Blackstar

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #305 on: 12/13/2017 12:55 am »
There is supposed to be a second SIGINT release, focusing on the P-11 smallsats.

I'm surprised by the stuff they released on the Agena SIGINT satellites because there are some obvious things that they did not release. No photos of the satellites, for instance (there is a photo of the HARVESTER payload, and a poor quality photo of a satellite in an assembly room, but that's it). They also could have released a better redacted version of "The SIGINT Satellite Story." And the reproduction quality of the Butterworth history that they did release is poor. And nothing on the tactical use of the satellites in Vietnam (known as "PENDULUM"). There's good stuff in that release, but lots of omissions.

Offline Star One

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #306 on: 12/13/2017 05:50 am »
There is supposed to be a second SIGINT release, focusing on the P-11 smallsats.

I'm surprised by the stuff they released on the Agena SIGINT satellites because there are some obvious things that they did not release. No photos of the satellites, for instance (there is a photo of the HARVESTER payload, and a poor quality photo of a satellite in an assembly room, but that's it). They also could have released a better redacted version of "The SIGINT Satellite Story." And the reproduction quality of the Butterworth history that they did release is poor. And nothing on the tactical use of the satellites in Vietnam (known as "PENDULUM"). There's good stuff in that release, but lots of omissions.

I was surprised at the quality of some the reproduced illustrations.

Offline Blackstar

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #307 on: 12/19/2017 07:47 pm »

Offline gosnold

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #308 on: 12/19/2017 08:56 pm »
http://thespacereview.com/article/3394/1

That reminds me I have somewhere  the calculations of how much data a digital system as capable as the KH-9 would produce, and it was horrendous.  There was something like 100kg of SSDs to bring back to Earth every 3 month.

Offline kevin-rf

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #309 on: 12/20/2017 03:15 pm »
Well back of envelope for 1' resolution 8 bit grey-scale (Black and White) on 1 mile squared is ~27 gig. Each Kh-9 Strip was ~380 miles long, so for each mile of coverage you are looking at maybe 10 TB uncompressed.  With decent compression, maybe a 1/2 TB. It's jut mind boggling, 10 TB per mile. 
« Last Edit: 12/20/2017 03:16 pm by kevin-rf »
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Offline Blackstar

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #310 on: 12/20/2017 04:09 pm »
Well back of envelope for 1' resolution 8 bit grey-scale (Black and White) on 1 mile squared is ~27 gig. Each Kh-9 Strip was ~380 miles long, so for each mile of coverage you are looking at maybe 10 TB uncompressed.  With decent compression, maybe a 1/2 TB. It's jut mind boggling, 10 TB per mile. 

I'll have to ask Phil Pressel about it. One of his friends who worked on the system did a back of the envelope calculation, but with different inputs. He used the line-per-mm standard that they use for measuring information density on the film. But he also added in a calculation for the shading in the film. I'm vague on the details, but it's not just a case of white or black, but of several shades of gray and that meant that they could get more detail out of the film depending upon how they processed it. So even though for the most part they used panchromatic film (not color) there was a tremendous amount of data in it.

Offline Archibald

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #311 on: 12/20/2017 06:36 pm »
Well back of envelope for 1' resolution 8 bit grey-scale (Black and White) on 1 mile squared is ~27 gig. Each Kh-9 Strip was ~380 miles long, so for each mile of coverage you are looking at maybe 10 TB uncompressed.  With decent compression, maybe a 1/2 TB. It's jut mind boggling, 10 TB per mile. 

10 TB PER MILE ?



:o
« Last Edit: 12/21/2017 05:26 pm by Archibald »
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Offline Hog

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #312 on: 12/20/2017 08:45 pm »
Well back of envelope for 1' resolution 8 bit grey-scale (Black and White) on 1 mile squared is ~27 gig. Each Kh-9 Strip was ~380 miles long, so for each mile of coverage you are looking at maybe 10 TB uncompressed.  With decent compression, maybe a 1/2 TB. It's jut mind boggling, 10 TB per mile.
I'm seeing that each frame shot by Hexagon could capture 370 nautical miles at a time, while each satellite was loaded with 60 miles of film..

https://www.wired.com/2012/08/cia-deep-sea-spy-sat/


Was there more film capacity as the program evolved?

Paul

Offline rguser

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #313 on: 12/21/2017 06:59 am »
Early HEXAGON satellite vehicles carried 208,000 feet of film while the later satellite vehicles carried 310,000 feet of film equally divided between the two cameras.  The 60 miles of film number is a rounded up approximation of the actual value of 58.7 miles.

  The 370 mile wide scan occured only when the maximum 120 degree scan was used and was not used as often as the other scan widths.  The 30, 60, and 90 degree scans covered less ground and were used more often than the 120 degree scan.

Offline kevin-rf

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #314 on: 12/21/2017 03:14 pm »
If you go by this declassified diagram ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon#/media/File:KH-9_HEXAGON_satellite_2.jpg ) each 120 degree strip was up to 300 nautical miles (NM) wide and 8.2 (NM) a nadir (center).

So assuming sampling at 1 ft at nadir gives you something like (6076 pixel (1 NM = 6076 feet) x 8.2) x (6076 x 300) = 84 GB 8 bit raw bw (256 levels of grey) per strip with the 120 degree sweep. 

30 degrees (using crude trig) should be 44 NM strip, 12 GB
60 degrees (using crude trig) should be 95 NM strip, 27 GB
90 degrees (using crude trig) should be 164 NM strip, 46 GB

Again, this all depends on:
1. Your sampling rate
    -dropping from 1 ft to 2ft sampling will drop your memory requirements by a factor of 4!,
    -dropping from 1 ft to 4 ft, factor of 16)
2. Bit depth
    -8 bits is standard, but lower bit depth could have been used,
    -again dropping memory requirements,
    -or higher, 12, 14 bit AtoD's are quite common in the imaging world)
3. What compression , if any is used (high compression could drop these values by a factor of 10 or so).
4. None of these back of envelope calcs use color (multiply size by a factor of three).

More fun, if memory serves, the film was 6" wide (0.5') and 310,000 feet long. That's (0.5 x 99646) x (310000 x 99646) =  1,400 TB for both reels.
« Last Edit: 12/21/2017 03:15 pm by kevin-rf »
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Offline Blackstar

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #315 on: 12/21/2017 03:47 pm »
If you go by this declassified diagram ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon#/media/File:KH-9_HEXAGON_satellite_2.jpg ) each 120 degree strip was up to 300 nautical miles (NM) wide and 8.2 (NM) a nadir (center).

So assuming sampling at 1 ft at nadir gives you something like (6076 pixel (1 NM = 6076 feet) x 8.2) x (6076 x 300) = 84 GB 8 bit raw bw (256 levels of grey) per strip with the 120 degree sweep. 

30 degrees (using crude trig) should be 44 NM strip, 12 GB
60 degrees (using crude trig) should be 95 NM strip, 27 GB
90 degrees (using crude trig) should be 164 NM strip, 46 GB

Again, this all depends on:
1. Your sampling rate
    -dropping from 1 ft to 2ft sampling will drop your memory requirements by a factor of 4!,
    -dropping from 1 ft to 4 ft, factor of 16)
2. Bit depth
    -8 bits is standard, but lower bit depth could have been used,
    -again dropping memory requirements,
    -or higher, 12, 14 bit AtoD's are quite common in the imaging world)
3. What compression , if any is used (high compression could drop these values by a factor of 10 or so).
4. None of these back of envelope calcs use color (multiply size by a factor of three).

More fun, if memory serves, the film was 6" wide (0.5') and 310,000 feet long. That's (0.5 x 99646) x (310000 x 99646) =  1,400 TB for both reels.

I'll just go and ask Phil. I may have dinner with him in the next week. He has the calculation somewhere. It's just a huge amount of data. High quality film is a pretty dense information storage medium, and they exposed a lot of film.

Offline kevin-rf

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #316 on: 12/21/2017 06:09 pm »
More amazing will be the story on how they digitized it. I remember a while ago you talking a bit out them doing just that.
« Last Edit: 12/21/2017 06:12 pm by kevin-rf »
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Offline Archibald

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #317 on: 12/21/2017 07:56 pm »
Amazing calculations, folks. The kind of things that make this forum such an amazing resource.

I now wonder, did the KH-11 had some kind of internal storage capability ? a kind of orbital hard disk / RAM to store some photos ?
Or was everything send to ground stations ?

Even if the military had years of avdance in data storage technology, whatever internal memory the KH-11 ever had stood no chance against those TeraBytes of informations the KH-9 provided... on film.

And they said "film is dead, long live digital" Yeah. Sure. Keep trying.

The wikipedia page on terabyte has some interesting comparisons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte

Quote
Examples of the use of terabyte to describe data sizes in different fields are:

    Library data: The U.S. Library of Congress Web Capture team claims that as of March 2014 "the Library has collected about 525 terabytes of web archive data" and that it adds about 5 terabytes per month.

    Online databases: Ancestry.com claims approximately 600 TB of genealogical data with the inclusion of US Census data from 1790 to 1930.

    The CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) released 300 terabytes of data to the global science community in April 2016 from its latest science run on the Large Hadron Collider. It Involved just the last science run of the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment, 1 of 4 large science instruments at the LHC facility.

    Computer hardware: Hitachi introduced the world's first one terabyte hard disk drive in 2007.

    Historical Internet traffic: In 1993, total Internet traffic amounted to approximately 100 TB for the year.[12] As of June 2008, Cisco Systems estimated Internet traffic at 160 TB/s (which, assuming to be statistically constant, comes to 5 zettabytes for the year).
In other words, the amount of Internet traffic per second in 2008 exceeded all of the Internet traffic in 1993.

    Social networks: As of May 2009, Yahoo! Groups had "40 terabytes of data to index".

    Video: Released in 2009, the 3D animated film Monsters vs. Aliens used 100 TB of storage during development.[15]

    Usenet: In October 2000, the Deja News Usenet archive had stored over 500 million Usenet messages which used 1.5 TB of storage.

    Encyclopedia: In January 2010, the database of Wikipedia consists of a 5.87 terabyte SQL dataset.

    Climate science: In 2010, the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ) was generating 10000 TB of data per year, from a supercomputer with a 20 TB memory and 7000 TB disk space.

    Audio: One terabyte of audio recorded at CD quality contains approx. 2000 hours of audio. Additionally, one terabyte of compressed audio recorded at 128 kbit/s contains approx. 17,000 hours of audio.

    The Hubble Space Telescope has collected more than 45 terabytes of data in its first 20 years of observations.

    The IBM computer Watson, against which Jeopardy! contestants competed in February 2011, has 16 terabytes of RAM.

    1 terabyte of data would require about 1428 CD-ROMs , 212 DVDs, or 40 single-layer Blu-ray Discs.

« Last Edit: 12/21/2017 08:05 pm by Archibald »
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Offline Blackstar

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #318 on: 12/21/2017 08:22 pm »
Amazing calculations, folks. The kind of things that make this forum such an amazing resource.

I now wonder, did the KH-11 had some kind of internal storage capability ? a kind of orbital hard disk / RAM to store some photos ?

It has to have some internal storage. There's no way that you'd want to build a system that would lose all the imagery if the comm link was not working.

My next articles will be on ZOSTER/FROG and SDS.

Offline Skyrocket

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Re: KH-11 KENNEN
« Reply #319 on: 12/21/2017 08:46 pm »
Amazing calculations, folks. The kind of things that make this forum such an amazing resource.

I now wonder, did the KH-11 had some kind of internal storage capability ? a kind of orbital hard disk / RAM to store some photos ?

It has to have some internal storage. There's no way that you'd want to build a system that would lose all the imagery if the comm link was not working.

My next articles will be on ZOSTER/FROG and SDS.

Have some SDS documents been declassified recently?

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