Satellite Imagery Trade-offs

Informative to know :

"Eventually, Andersen said, the big but light telescopes could solve a spy-satellite conundrum. Now, those camera equipped satellites must fly closer to Earth to generate usable pictures. That means their orbits exceed the speed of Earth’s rotation, so the satellites cannot spend much time photographing one location. If spy satellites had huge telescopes, they could be placed higher above the planet in an orbit that moves at the same speed as Earth’s rotation, so they could photograph the same region constantly."

There's just one tiny comment that makes a bad impression - “That way, you could keep a constant eye on someone like Osama bin Laden” he said." In exactly the say way a security consultant wrongly tries to talk top management into increasing a budget by using the buzzword cyberterrorism, it wouldn't work and it's a rather desperate move. Even though, in case you're interested in keeping track of Bin Laden's desert trips, make sure you add a detection pattern for a white horse riding through Afghanistan.

Go through some of my previous posts to catch up with my comments on related topics.