My pareidolia knows no bounds.

Larry, one other thing occurred to me. Suppose you were about 500 yards away from your house. You could probably still pick it out of the lineup, but you wouldn't see all the details you're very familiar with. You would probably know it was your house, and you would certainly know it was <b>a</b> house.

Now compare that to standing right in front of your house on the sidewalk.

Maybe you're right. This will never be fully resolved until and unless someone is standing right in front of them.

My contention is that right now, we're doing the equivalent of viewing these things from a few hundred yards away. Kind of sad, when you think about it, but unfortunately, no one at mission control takes artificial questions all that seriously. That's not what they do.

rd

I suspect that many of them (in PRIVATE) take it very seriously. But a Government Grant Machine has been created and it is, of course, in the hands of politicians. So they (people in places like Mission Control) fear for their jobs. They do have families to support, after all.

(And that's kind of sad, too. I really did want to be a physicist and work at a place like that. But as I began to understand how the system worked, I began to realize that I would never make it there. So I went the engineer route instead. Worked fairly well, too. But physics is still my first love. And Tom is still my hero.)

(Do I need to get back up on my soap box? Sigh. It's way off topic here, but go to the category Big Science and Big Government for the real poop.)

Resolution, by itself, is not the key.

But for the right content, resolution makes ALL the difference.

There is a limit to how much you can understand about a thing you cannot touch. (Jim knows this, don't you?)

We use models to help us try, and a really good model can fill in some/many of the gaps.

But even a good model can trick us, if we are not careful.

Right now we are talking about normal sized things a long way away. But the same is true of really big things even farther away, or of really small things directly in front of us. If you have to use some sort of indirect means of "feeling" it (a model/theory/guess) you <u>are</u> going to get <u>some</u> of it wrong.

For the better models, some = 'not very much'.

For models that are not so good, some = 'more that you care to admit'

So which is which? If I could answer that question every time I'd be a real god.

OK, check this out:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11

"Nine KH-11 satellites were launched between 1976 and 1990 aboard Titan-3D and #8722;34D rockets, with one launch failure. For the following five satellite launches between 1992 and 2005, a Titan IV launch vehicle was used. The two most recent launches in 2011 and 2013 were carried out by Delta IV Heavy rockets. The KH-11 replaced the KH-9 film return satellite, among others, the last of which was lost in a liftoff explosion in 1986."

Just below this paragraph on the page, there's a table of the Launches starting in 1979. Note the Orbit column. If you compare it to the HiRise it's in the same ballpark.

Here's a famous "leaked" image called "Jane's KH-11 Leaked Photo" (KH-11 image of the construction of a Kiev-class aircraft carrier, as published by Jane's in 1984.)

From 1984, at the same height as the HiRise:



Here's some other KH Images:

KH-BOMBER-IMAGE


Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory-KH-11 image:


Zhawar_Kili_Al-Badr_Camp


2nd Kiev Image


I haven't found yet what the resolution of the spy cameras were (perhaps they don't want me to find it?), but here's a logical question:

Which would have better resolution, a 1984 Spy Camera, or a brand new Mars Explorer Camera? Any guesses? I tell you what. If it was me, I'd settle for the 1984 Camera.

My wife thought it was funny when I said I hadn't found the specs for the spy satellite yet, "Ya think!"





rd

The specs are most likely out there. Military secrets have the shortest half life of any kind of secret.

But once it 'escapes' it can be hard to track it down.

Life is funny (peculiar).