흥신소 For governments, spy satellites offer advantages over aircraft and high-altitude balloons. They can collect signals and high-resolution images and fly in a part of space that’s difficult to track.
Unlike commercial imaging satellites, which orbit in visible light orbits, reconnaissance satellites fly at higher altitudes and often mingle with telecommunications satellites. That raises their sensitivity.
What Are Spy Satellites?
Spy satellites are robotic observational platforms that orbit the Earth in order to take pictures and record radio signals for military and political purposes. The images or radio data they collect are analyzed and manipulated by specialists in centralized intelligence facilities.
Spy technology has been essential to the development of military strategy and to international diplomacy, as well as to the verification of arms control treaties. It has also helped to improve our ability to monitor environmental changes, as well as the activities of other nations, and has given governments a powerful tool for ensuring that they comply with international law.
There are many different types of spy satellites, each designed to serve a specific purpose. For example, some are equipped with cameras that can provide detailed images of the Earth, while others are able to detect radio signals from equipment such as communications systems. Still others can track the movements of enemy aircraft or vehicles, or provide other types of intelligence.
Unlike the old Soviet satellites, which took pictures on film and then developed them in orbit, 흥신소 the latest systems use digital photography that is transmitted back to Earth in real time. These systems are launched by space shuttles and Titan 4 rockets, then managed by the National Reconnaissance Office, headquartered in Chantilly, Virginia. Most of the modern spy satellites are polar-orbiting photoreconnaissance satellites, each able to view only a small portion of the surface of Earth at one time.
Why Do We Need Spy Satellites?
Espionage is a familiar topic in our culture, from James Bond movies to Mata Hari. But in a very real sense, we are all constantly being spied on from space.
The satellites of a growing number of nations orbit our planet, collecting troves of data about what humans are doing down below. This information is used both in the military and civilian communities.
While the United States and Russia are responsible for by far the greatest number of spy satellites in operation, many other nations have developed their own capabilities. The CIA, for example, has had to deal with embarrassing incidents in which satellites have crashed or strayed off course.
In the past, the United States has launched three major spy satellite programs, Corona, SAMOS and Cosmos, that followed polar orbits at altitudes of 150 miles, rotating around Earth every 90 minutes. This allows the satellite to view only a small portion of the world at any one time.
While satellites offer exquisite imagery and signals, they are expensive to build and operate. A high-altitude balloon, on the other hand, is relatively inexpensive to deploy and can stay in a single area for much longer than a satellite. Also, there are different norms that govern spying in orbit versus airspace, where high-altitude balloons operate. Shooting down an unknown object in another nation’s airspace is tolerated, but blowing up a satellite would be a major escalation.
How Do Spy Satellites Work?
While many Americans have a preconceived notion of spy satellites based on action-adventure films, the reality is quite different. First, the vast majority of satellite images don’t have enough resolution to jeopardize a person’s privacy. For example, even a high-resolution government image can’t show the make and model of a car sitting on a street hundreds of miles below.
In addition, most of the CIA’s modern imaging satellites use a digital information system, not the analog TV signals used by Corona and SAMOS. This has allowed the agency to abandon the cumbersome “bucket-dropping” technique and rely on long-term satellites to continuously cover the places it wants to watch, such as missile fields in China or Russia.
A modern spy satellite costs about a billion dollars and can stay in orbit for years. It can also carry electronic listening equipment, known as SIGINT, to monitor communications.
The National Reconnaissance Office, created in 1960, oversees the CIA’s space-surveillance programs. Squabbling between the Air Force and the CIA moved President Dwight Eisenhower to create the NRO, a group whose members are both from the military and civilian agencies.
NRO’s latest stealth satellite, NROL-44, is scheduled to go into a highly elliptical orbit at 36,000 kilometers (12,000 miles) above Earth. This will put it in the same area as telecommunications satellites, which means it will mingle with commercial data from the likes of Google and Ikonos. This may be a good thing if the satellite needs to eavesdrop, but it isn’t necessarily a bad thing for image-resolution images.
What Are Spy Satellites Used For?
There are four main types of spy satellites. They are optical-imaging satellites that can “see” enemy weapons and missile launches with light sensors; radar-imaging satellites, which observe the Earth through radar technology from space; signals intelligence satellites, known as ferrets, which listen to radio and microwave transmissions from any country on the planet; and communications relay satellites, which allow military satellites to communicate with stations on Earth much more quickly than they otherwise could.
The satellites that President Trump tweeted out were from the KH-11 series, which has launched 17 times since 1976. Each one costs a few hundred million dollars and provides a high-resolution view of the globe from space. The images they produce are processed and manipulated by the National Reconnaissance Office. The hardware itself is classified, but a few amateur satellite trackers such as Dutch archaeologist Marco Langbroek and New York Times visual investigator Christiaan Triebert have been able to identify them by their distinctive shapes.
The United States and its allies have an extensive network of spy satellites, which the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates contain more than 2,000 operational satellites today. The satellites are loaded with cameras and other sensors that help the U.S. keep tabs on its rivals in the space race for global supremacy. But the recent leaks have also triggered debate over whether the nation should continue with a program that it has long argued is wasteful and dangerous to national security.