Fox News "Cosmos 1220"

[Phillip Clark]

The attached illustration is taken from a Fox News story about the re-entry of Cosmos 1220: the story itself can be found at:

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/02/16/russian-reconnaissance-satellite-burns-up-in-atmosphere-report-says/

Does anyone know the pedigree of this image please?   Is it simply the result of the demented imagination of someone asked to draw what Cosmos 1220 looked like?

[collectSPACE]

It is credited elswhere as a generic concept of an imagery intelligence satellite by artist Erik Simonsen.

[Gorizont]

Hi Phillip, I used some webpages as a reference.
Cosmos-1220 seems to be different looking to this image.

Using Gunterīs webpage it was one of the "US-P" satellites.
http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/us-p.htm

greetings...
Soeren

[Phillip Clark]

Soeren/Gorizont

Gunter, of course, is correct in what he shows.   We have known what the EORSATs/US-P looked like for about 25 years.   Which is why I wondered why this made-up drawing had been used.

On the other hand, my understanding is that Fox "News" has little to do with reporting accurate news!!!

Phil