Yes. The real difference is that the newer tech is cheap and fast enough to be useful in real time to general industry and local/state government, not just spooks.
I used to work for an imaging satellite company. And yes - spy satellites are crazy powerful. The real problem is one of bandwidth. Crazy powerful spy satellites are expensive - and there aren’t a lot of them.
So everybody is competing for time on them. Satellite images have been traditionally expensive and rare. We web intelligence agencies have to take turns and sometimes miss important events due to scheduling or timing conflicts.
The thing these new satellites offer is broad coverage. When you have a few hundred small-sats there’s just many, many more opportunities to have eyes on the part of the world you’re interested in.
All that said, you want to pay attention to the resolution of the images. The place I worked for was providing imagery about 1-meter resolution. E.g. each pixel in the image corresponded to about 1sq-meter of earth. We figured this was a good compromise between image quality and privacy. Enough to count cars, see weather patterns, make out groups of people, but identifying any given person was right out.
So if you see an imaging company throwing a bazillion imaging small-sats up - its worth checking what their reported resolution is. 0.5m means a real tall dude would still only be 2 pixels. But 1cm resolution means you could count their teeth.
As far as I remember, there’s a resolution limit to classical imaging, but I guess that may be overcome by using a mesh of satellites and some other clever methods
Are you talking about launching your own satellite with the ability to aim a laser at another satellite while in orbit, or are you talking about attempting to point a ground based laser at something moving at roughly Mach 24 or faster?
Beam decoherence is a pretty big problem when you are lasering through the entire atmosphere, and both scenarios require an astounding degree of precision.
The latter - targeting from ground. While that sounds daunting, it’s already possible. Sats can aim data laser beams at other sats at even higher relative speeds.
Beam decoherence is a pretty big problem when you are lasering through the entire atmosphere, and both scenarios require an astounding degree of precision.
Beam coherence is the only problem with targeting sats from the ground. But remember, these sats come with big telescopes to collect as much light as they can. It may not take a lot of radiative flux to overload their sensors. I wonder how much it will take to completely fry them.
Honey, the REAL question you're going to have to answer is how the fuck you're going to target an object around the size of your face from 400km away while it's moving at thousands of miles per hour. Not only THAT, you also have to shoot it within a very narrow angle to ensure the power of the laser hits the sensor directly. Not only THAT THAT, but you also have to be completely certain the camera doesn't have some sort of aperture that's closed whenever you're FIRIN YUR LAZOR.
So if you have inside information about the exact times that the aperture will be open, the exact angle it will be photographing at, precisely what trajectory it's on and where it's going (this one's actually easy, most space objects are tracked rather precisely and publicly), then maybe... MAYBE, IF YOU CAN TRACK IT, you'll get off a zap or two.
And even then it would only work as long as the internal filters aren't designed to block common laser wavelengths. They're probably not, because everything else is so astonishingly stupid that it's not going to happen.
Honey, the REAL answer is such tech ALREADY EXISTS! Your cynical snark doesn’t make you smart or right. It just makes you one ignorant fellow. I’m not even going to bother answering you, because you aren’t here for answers. You are here to insult, annoy and pick a fight with strangers. Go look for it elsewhere.
I do astrophotography, dingus. I'm well aware such mounts exist. I'm also aware of NASA's history of shooting lasers at the moon to track changes in its distance.
Have a look at that table. See all those specific wavelengths? If your dumbass idea is even remotely feasible then every single photographic satellite in orbit will ABSOLUTELY have filters that will carve out those narrow bands and others that could be realistically used to damage a camera. Lasers operate at specific wavelengths.
I do, however, doubt that any satellite has this type of filtration because this idea is inherently stupid. Say you do somehow manage this. Guess what? You've put a few pixels out of commission. What happens then? It's pretty fuckin' simple. The satellite moves slightly and another picture gets taken with the obscured area now in view.
Because that's how satellite imaging works.
If you laser is powerful, accurate, and fast tracking enough to destroy an entire imaging sensor from 400km away you're better off just using it to ransom passing aircraft.
Sats that beam data to other sats do not have to worry about the atmosphere, nor are they using anywhere near the kind of power involved to fry the other sats. Its orders of magnitude greater power for that, which means more more weight and thus launch cost.
Beam decoherence is a /huge/ problem when trying to go from ground to low earth orbit.
You would again end up needing a pretty significant power supply along with exceptionally precise tracking.
Im talking military grade equipment here, massive expensive and complex. Not something you could whip up in your garage, unless you worked at it for a decade, and if you did that, youd end up in jail.
I really want to stress how precise your tracking needs to be. Assuming you precisely know the orbital trajectory, your /exact/ location, the rotation of the earth… you would need to have a mechanical system capable of sustained tracking to… what like a few (roughly 3 by updated calculations) arc seconds, something like that, to hit something /and stay on target for probably 30 minutes/ that is 120 miles away, roughly the size of an SUV
EDIT: Fixed up my numbers, I was thinking in terms of the wrong unit.
Point is… this approach requires an astounding degree of tracking precision that is basically impossible unless you are a defense contractor.
Tracking a thing this accurately alone is practically impossible. And I mean that literally. There is no practical way you can do this, unless you consider starting up your own engineering firm to solve this, and you are allowed to use a whole bunch of tech with current security classifications, unless you consider that practical.
If you do, hi Elon Musk, didnt realize you were on lemmy.
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