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U.S. Government to Allow Sale of High-Resolution Commercial Satellite Images of Israel

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday July 21 2020, @01:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the picture-this dept.

takyon writes:

U.S. government to allow sale of high-resolution commercial satellite images of Israel

The federal government will soon allow U.S. commercial remote sensing companies to sell high-resolution satellite images of Israel, changing resolution limits that have been in place for more than two decades.

In a draft of a Federal Register notice obtained by SpaceNews, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which hosts the office that licenses U.S. commercial remote sensing satellite systems, says it will reduce the resolution limit on satellite imagery of Israel from 2 meters to 0.4 meters. It is also available as an "unpublished notice" available for public inspection on the Federal Register website, with a note that it is scheduled for formal publication July 21.

A provision of the 1997 National Defense Authorization Act known as the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment limits commercial satellite imaging systems licensed by the federal government to providing imagery of Israel that is "no more detailed or precise than satellite imagery of Israel that is available from commercial sources." Since 1998, NOAA has interpreted that to mean images with a resolution no sharper than 2 meters, a limit reviewed and upheld by NOAA in 2018.

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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by takyon on Tuesday July 21 2020, @03:09AM (4 children)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Tuesday July 21 2020, @03:09AM (#1024424) Journal

    Let's turn the question around: Can you do some internet searches, and find detailed imagery of Israeli airbases, seabases, and nuclear facilities? It may be out there now, but after this, it WILL be out there.

    https://www.npr.org/2019/08/30/755994591/president-trump-tweets-sensitive-surveillance-image-of-iran [npr.org]

    Some of the highest-resolution imagery available commercially comes from the company Maxar, whose WorldView-2 satellite sports 46-centimeter resolution.

    But the image shown in the president's tweet appears to be of far better quality, says Ankit Panda, an adjunct senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, who specializes in analyzing satellite imagery. "The resolution is amazingly high," says Panda. "I would think it's probably below well below 20 centimeters, which is much higher than anything I've ever seen."

    [...] It was not entirely clear where the president's photo came from. Panda believes it was most likely taken by a classified U.S. satellite. But Melissa Hanham, deputy director of the Open Nuclear Network at the One Earth Foundation, believes that the resolution is so high, it may be beyond the physical limits at which satellites can operate. "The atmosphere is thick enough that after somewhere around 11 to 9 centimeters, things get wonky," she says.

    Need that 5-centimeter imagery.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2020, @03:41AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2020, @03:41AM (#1024432)

    > Need that 5-centimeter imagery.

    Didn't our revolutionary war fighters say, "Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes?" That sounds like 1 cm imagery. Do drones have that resolution before a target gets taken out?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2020, @04:31AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2020, @04:31AM (#1024449)

      There's a reason why they said that, at the time, reloading was time consuming and firing sooner and missing was a bigger concern than being shot for waiting too long.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2020, @05:21AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2020, @05:21AM (#1024468)

    5 cm? They'll be able to see my penis. Why does everyone want to see my penis??!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2020, @07:28AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2020, @07:28AM (#1024493)

    Need that 5-centimeter imagery.

    I don't want to see Trump's dick, thank you.