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The top secret URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH satellites (2025)

306 points · 162 comments · Bluestein

  1. Almondsetat · · focus · HN ↗
    The incredible and futuristic technologies the US managed to deploy decades before the competition reminds me of the story of how the NRO gifted NASA a couple of their old decommissioned satellites in 2012 and they turned out to be basically upgraded Hubble telescopes pointed at earth. The US from the 90s to the 2000s had multiple Hubble-level telescopes just for spying while NASA was fighting for scraps to study the entire cosmos.
    1. walrus01 · · focus · HN ↗
      We see a few bits and pieces released to the public of optical/infrared wavelength mirrors and hubble-like hardware from IMINT systems. One thing that's never really been shown to the public, not even 50 year old 1970s era stuff, are photos/examples of the SIGINT systems that the NSA likely has in orbit. Or good details of other things that also fall within the RF engineering domain like synthetic aperture radar satellites to monitor naval activity, construction activity like digging bunkers, etc.

      If you think the public DEM/DSM datasets like the ASTER GDER v3 or SRTM GL1 V3 are pretty good, I would bet that the DoD has things far more accurate than those as digital models of the surface and built environment of the earth's surface.

      1. somenameforme · · focus · HN ↗
        What would be the point of going much more high tech than what's already commercially available? You can buy commercial satellite footage at a native resolution of 25cm, optionally upscaled to 15cm, for $20/km^2. [1] A bit of processing and you could certainly do high precision geographic mapping. In either case that's already enough to track individual people from space.

        I suppose even higher and you could start resolving things like license plate numbers from space, but it just seems like sharply diminishing returns in general.

        [1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xrtechgroup.com&#x2F;who-has-the-highest-resolution-satellite-imagery&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xrtechgroup.com&#x2F;who-has-the-highest-resolution-satel...

        1. ozim · · focus · HN ↗
          Still far from cheap, decent sized city is 200km^2 that’s like $4k.

          Much rather contribute that amount one time to OSM and have details from all cities from there.

          1. TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
            It&#x27;s that cheap?

            I mean, it sounds like $4k and maybe again as much on compute could fix OSM for a city?

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