Photos of damage in Iraq - was USA 86, 116, 129 elsets
Philip Chien (kc4yer@amsat.org)
Mon, 21 Dec 1998 17:06:27 -0500
"Allen Thomson" <thomsona@dzn.com> said:
>There's a current mini-flurry around the question of whether the pictures
>the Pentagon has been showing of Iraqi buildings with holes in them were
>taken by US reconnaissance satellites. I've tried to check the passes of
>the known spysats over Baghdad to see if sun- and look-angles are consistent
>with the pictures, but, alas, the elsets are from the mid-982xx epochs.
altitude platform. I would suspect that the U.S. is not risking aircraft
and pilots just to produce unclassified images for public distribution
(although this was the policy in the past when the SR-71 was operational,
the military had a higher budget, and the very existence of photo recon
satellites was denied).
So the obvious source of the Iraq images is high resolution satellite images.
While the obvious assumption is classified NRO photo recon satellites (KH
series) another possibility might be commercial satellite imagery. I don't
know if any of the commercial earth resource satellites has that much
resolution or was in the right place at the right time, but it's certainly
worth looking in to.
Philip Chien, KC4YER
Earth News
world (in)famous writer, science fiction fan, ham radio operator,
all-around nice guy, etc.