Better than Google Earth.......more than 30 years ago

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

In an era long before smartphones and 'street view', a team of American engineers were hard at work creating top secret spy satellites, the Hexagon KH-9 Reconnaissance class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon



Nineteen different satellite missions captured images of a staggering 877 million square miles of the Earth's surface between 1971 and 1986, according to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.

'These were much better pictures than Google Earth,' Phil Pressel told CNN's Declassified.
Despite the satellites orbiting at heights in excess of 100 miles above the earth, the engineer said they were able to capture incredibly detailed photographs thanks to its two-foot resolution - meaning objects that were about two-foot in diameter could be clearly seen.

Each individual satellite weighed about 30,000 pounds and were about the same size as a school bus.

They were launched aboard Titan IIID rockets in California, and dropped 'buckets' containing pictures stored in capsules down from the satellites so they could be scooped up.

Once the buckets reached 50,000 feet somewhere above the Hawaiian Islands, parachutes were deployed and they slowly floated down towards Earth.

However, the never touched the ground, with Air Force pilots flying specialized cargo planes looking in on the buckets by using a tracking system and then collecting them out of mid-air.

Each satellite was able to spend an average of 124 days on a mission, and had more than 320,000 feet of 6.6 inch-wide film on-board.

The capsules the film was dropped down to Earth in weighed 956 pounds.

HEXAGON SPY SATELLITE FACT SHEET
Altitude: 80-370 nautical miles (92-426 miles)

Mission duration: 124 days on average

Panoramic cameras: Perkin-Elmer, 60-inch focal length f/3.0, aperture 20 inches

Mapping camera: Itek, 12-inch focal length f/6.0, 9.5 in film, with two Itek 10-in focal length f/2.0, 70mm film cameras for star-tracking position reference

Film: Length 320,000 feet (about 60 miles), width 6.6 inches

Number of film return capsules: Four (five if mapping camera used)

Maximum film load per capsule: 52,000-77,500 feet

Maximum film weight per capsule: 500 pounds

Capsule weight: 956 pounds

(Source: National Museum of the U.S. Air Force)

 

[kn00tcn]

i want to see a satellite shot aimed at 45 degrees or at the horizon

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

1) satellite
2) 45 degrees
3) horizon

 

[dont whant to set it"']

1) satellite
2) 45 degrees
3) horizon

At first glance I tought it has to be an airplane, but after zooming in its a Space Shuttle with cargo bay doors fully opened,got confused there for a sec by the shape.Cheers.
Le: so that old piece of engeneiring could do stereoscopic pictures?guess google earth cant do that right.Darn impresive,even more would be if film data exist in electronic form.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

High resolution satellites (e.g. those operated by commercial satellite companies like DigitalGlobe or by the government/military) operate just a few hundred kilometers above the Earth. This means they only see a small part of the Earth with their camera as they orbit over. They typically go around the Earth every 90 minutes, but only cover about 1% of the Earth on each pass – but, most of the area covered in a pass is water. Not only that, but imagery for Google Earth is only going to be good if the sun is at a high angle when the satellite goes over (fewer shadows), when there are no clouds, and as little haze/pollution as possible. Believe it or not, the times when all these factors come together are pretty rare. It can take months or years for a good quality image to be taken by satellite even if you pay lots of money!

Once the imagery is taken, it takes time to process the data before it is available to customers. Google is one of these customers (a really big one). Google has to evaluate the new imagery against the current imagery to determine whether the new is better than the current. They have computers to automate as much of this as possible. But, for important areas with large populations the process to check and verify the quality takes time. Once an image is selected, it has to be processed into the format and coordinate system of Google Earth’s databases. Then it has to go through a quality control process and fed into a processing system before it gets distributed to the live Google Earth database servers. This is one reason why you usually do not find any imagery younger than about 6 months in Google Earth and Maps. And why updates usually only happen about once every 30 days.


http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2014/04/google-earth-imagery.html

 

[Recon-UK]

Thanks for sharing CAPS, i have been looking at all this space stuff even more, and yeah.... a lot of older tech is actually incredibly advanced.

Nikola Tesla is also someone who got "nerfed"

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Was just going to post this. The Hexagon program pretty much killed off the U-2 and SR-71 programs.

Imagine what modern satellites can do...