[bee_rider]

I wonder if imaging from above could actually be a threat for these planes. I mean -- stick cameras on all the SpaceX satellites and you've got an awful lot of eyeballs in LEO, right? Might at least be able to tell a ground based radar where to focus their search...

[t0mas88]

They fly in the dark and IR imaging doesn't work very well due to coatings and trying to hide the engine heath signature.

[andrelaszlo]

When each signature refers to the previous one, it forms a Heath Ledger?

[tener]

Pretty sure you need powerful lenses to do useful things though, but who knows, maybe this is workable with some image processing of multiple satellite feeds?

[bee_rider]

Yeah, I'm sure somebody is already doing good work on whatever the photographic equivalent of Synthetic Aperture Radar is. They should call it Synthetic Lens Aperture Photography, so they could use SLAP as the acronym (the most important property of a research topic is of course the ability to come up with good titles).

For example:

SLAP BASS: a Synthetic Lens Aperture Photography, Bandwidth Augmenting Sensor Suite

Does it make technical sense? I have no idea. But it sounds cool!

[cooljacob204]

They often fly their missions at night time, so this would mitigate that.