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I bet the United States' National Reconnaissance Office already has satellites that have the capability. And it's fair to assume they won't be redirecting sensi

I bet the United States' National Reconnaissance Office already has satellites that have the capability. And it's fair to assume they won't be redirecting sensitive military hardware for civilian purposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office

planteen 8y ago
Assuming for a moment the NRO has developed suitable optics to image the Earth real-time from geo at say 1 FPS, along with a sensor, and way to pipe everything back to the ground. There are still a couple unavoidable major flaws with such a system: 1) Clouds 2) You can't see all latitudes from geo, the higher the latitude gets, the more marginal the images will be. So I really doubt such a capability exists. Look a the FOV for a geo satellite like GOES-15: http://www.wmo-sat.info/oscar/satellites/view/151 http://www.wmo-sat.info/oscar/satellites/view/151
- Rebelgecko 8y ago
  I don't understand where #2 is coming from. There's plenty of places to go in space other than GEO.
  - planteen 8y ago
    How are you going to continuously monitor the same area on the Earth without being in GEO? We'd know about a constellation of NRO satellites with continuous coverage of an area of the Earth from the folks at satobs.org.
    - 6nf 8y ago
      You can't see anything from GEO, it's just too far away to be useful. No way they'll put them out that far.
      - planteen 8y ago
        Yeah, I know. The whole point of my post was in response to abhiminator that I don't think the NRO has the capability to get a live stream of the entire Earth continuously. Are you agreeing with me, or are you saying you think there is an undiscovered & undetectable NRO LEO/MEO constellation continuously observing all parts of the planet?
        6nf 8y ago
        > continuously observing all parts of the planet? No there's no way this is happening right now. I'm confident that they can continuously observe specific arbitrary locations of interest, but not the entire planet all at the same time. That's crazy talk.
        abhiminator 8y ago
        Thank you for the write-up. I stand corrected.
Quai 8y ago
It's not unheard-of; https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/spysat-and-shuttle-180962872/ https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/spysat-and-shuttle-...

planteen 8y ago

Assuming for a moment the NRO has developed suitable optics to image the Earth real-time from geo at say 1 FPS, along with a sensor, and way to pipe everything back to the ground. There are still a couple unavoidable major flaws with such a system: 1) Clouds 2) You can't see all latitudes from geo, the higher the latitude gets, the more marginal the images will be. So I really doubt such a capability exists. Look a the FOV for a geo satellite like GOES-15: http://www.wmo-sat.info/oscar/satellites/view/151 http://www.wmo-sat.info/oscar/satellites/view/151

Rebelgecko 8y ago
I don't understand where #2 is coming from. There's plenty of places to go in space other than GEO.
- planteen 8y ago
  How are you going to continuously monitor the same area on the Earth without being in GEO? We'd know about a constellation of NRO satellites with continuous coverage of an area of the Earth from the folks at satobs.org.
  - 6nf 8y ago
    You can't see anything from GEO, it's just too far away to be useful. No way they'll put them out that far.
    - planteen 8y ago
      Yeah, I know. The whole point of my post was in response to abhiminator that I don't think the NRO has the capability to get a live stream of the entire Earth continuously. Are you agreeing with me, or are you saying you think there is an undiscovered & undetectable NRO LEO/MEO constellation continuously observing all parts of the planet?
      - 6nf 8y ago
        > continuously observing all parts of the planet? No there's no way this is happening right now. I'm confident that they can continuously observe specific arbitrary locations of interest, but not the entire planet all at the same time. That's crazy talk.
      - abhiminator 8y ago
        Thank you for the write-up. I stand corrected.

Quai 8y ago

It's not unheard-of; https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/spysat-and-shuttle-180962872/ https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/spysat-and-shuttle-...