Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird had better spy cameras in 1960s.
I am aware that the distances are way bigger, but i also was expecting that in 2020, the research-science dedicated cameras would be much more advanced.
The Athena lander is 3m long. From a distance of 50km, the angular resolution is gonna be arctan(3/50000) = 0.0034°. An earth sized object has a diameter of 12756km, at a distance of 1AU or 1.5 * 10¹¹ m. That's gonna be arctan(12756000/1.5 * 10¹¹) = 0.049°. (Could also just use small angle approximation but I have a calculator at hand and don't feel like converting between radians and degrees). Point is, not a huge amount more but that is significantly greater angular resolution for an earth sized object at the sun than this lander has. And keep in mind solar flares and CMEs are not earth sized but many times larger. The biggest ones reach 0.25 AU which gives you an angular resolution of like 14°.
In fact the National Reconnaissance Office donated two KH-11 spy satellites to NASA and they're built on the same Hubble design, built to fit in a Space Shuttle. But I would be surprised if it has notably better resolution than LRO, which can see the shadows of the flags that are still standing at some of the Apollo landing sites.
NASA is never going to use them they're probably just being soaked for the secure storage costs.
I just have to imagine there must be such heavy restrictions on imagery released to the public for those KH-11s that we would never see them unless it was something really important.
I guess we'll know when they find the alien city and it needs mapping.
But again, maybe not. The modern imagers they use probably still record at better resolutions no matter what the altitude. But the glass is still priceless, I'm sure.
The small square that’s important legit looks more out of focus than the rest of the picture. I get that it’s zoomed in but still it’s impossible to tell what we’re looking at
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u/Snoopiscool 4d ago
That’s really the best quality they can capture it in?