Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by DuskStar 2138 days ago
> 2. Live feed is a bit tricky, and that's where governments have an advantage - they own their own satellites, and can task them to follow a specific target. But you have to know where the target is at the start of the window, they don't have real-time video of the whole planet, and unless you've got a very big fleet you won't always have a satellite overhead when you want to look at your target.

I would really not be surprised to see the NRO go the Planet Labs / Starlink route at some point in the future and put 20 satellites in a dozen orbital planes to provide coverage everywhere at less than 60 degrees latitude 24/7/365. Sure, maybe you need the big KH-11s for the extremely high resolution shots - but 3m resolution isn't exactly trash either.

2 comments

At 3m resolution a tank is about 3 pixels; a sedan is around 1 pixel. It's very hard to distinguish objects from each other and therefore to track one at that resolution.
> unless you've got a very big fleet

Starlink