2 ms·

The paper contrasts the deployable annular telescope to JWST. However, all of the performance discussions are in relation to Earth imaging from a geo-sync orbit

• techdragon 5y ago
  Not surprised because it’s clearly derivative of the sort of huge antenna trickery they have to use on the massive sigint satellites which tend to be Geostationary adjacent to either just let them loiter over a hemisphere, or conveniently drift in front or behind important geostationary assets of other countries in order to Hoover up stray RF signals with their massive dishes in order to perform as much analysis on it as possible since unless you broadcast 24/7 white noise mixed with encrypted traffic up and down at a constant power level, they are going to be able to work out … something… from the RF which will make it worth their while. These are huge beasts with dishes of 100 meters in the previous generation of MAGNUM satellites and over 100 meters in the latest MENTOR satellites… of course these numbers are based on the usual educated rumour mill sources necessary with any spy satellite information that has yet to be declassified, and the entire SIGINT family of satellites going right back to almost the very first is as black as pitch, it’s code name only educated guesswork and a couple of rare leaks of surprisingly inconsequential information. But the dish sizes are one of the more consistent bits of information so it’s a fairly safe bet these lower bound numbers are accurate.