For something as big and massive as a T-72 tank, does 30 cm or 10 cm makes a difference ?
(all hail the metric system !)
What kind of extremelly small details was the NRO interested about ? Reading car identification plates ? For something as big and massive as a T-72 tank, does 30 cm or 10 cm makes a difference ?
I guess you'll have to wait for part 3 of my article to find out...
Quote from: Blackstar on 03/27/2018 02:43 pmI guess you'll have to wait for part 3 of my article to find out...The 51-year-old, newly-declassified suspense is killing me!
Not to throw us off topic, but your link also has table entries for Radar and IR. While it seems like such resolution would be achievable from airborne assets, is better than 4" from orbit achievable with Radar and IR?
And I'll confess that I don't know the history of the NIIRS scale. I assume somebody has written about this in a photogrammetry journal, and I assume that before there was a NIIRS scale there was something else.The history of US reconnaissance satellites has an interesting side-story around 1963-1965 when the CIA (under Bud Wheelon) sought to codify the relationship between resolution and what you could learn from it. There are actually quite a few documents about this, but I have not looked at them closely. Wheelon told me way back in the mid-1990s that when he started battling with NRO, one of the things he wanted to find out what what photo-interpreters could see at different resolutions, so he started a study project to assess that. Some of those documents have been declassified. But what I don't know is the broader context of that. For example, I assume that since there were photo-interpreters during WWII, they had already established some scales/tables on this subject back then, and I don't know why Wheelon needed to do it in 1963. Maybe he simply was unhappy with the quality of the approach to the subject. He was a really smart guy and probably wanted some rigor applied to it.
Changing the subject slightly...You mentioned in the comments of your Space Review articles that you had interviewed Albert Crews who was selected to fly both X-20 and MOL. Do you know if he ever applied to be a NASA astronaut? He was judged too old to be included in the MOL transfer group in 1969 (Group 7) but did he ever apply for earlier NASA groups?
WWII experience probably needed some updates for recent weapon systems, such as radars, SAMs, ballistic missiles... Plus nuclear power plants and launch complexes.
Quote from: Jim Davis on 03/29/2018 07:32 pmChanging the subject slightly...You mentioned in the comments of your Space Review articles that you had interviewed Albert Crews who was selected to fly both X-20 and MOL. Do you know if he ever applied to be a NASA astronaut? He was judged too old to be included in the MOL transfer group in 1969 (Group 7) but did he ever apply for earlier NASA groups?I'd rather not divert this into the "let's all speculate about astronauts" thread, but I believe he did apply and was turned down. He later became a NASA pilot.
Could you see human beings through a 1 m resolution camera ? The MOL telescope had such resolution, and the crew was to peer at the Soviet Union through it, searching for opportunity targets, and then requesting the KH-10 camera to make pictures.
<snip>Could you see human beings through a 1 m resolution camera ? <snip>