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Out of the shadows ...
Sep. 19th, 2011 12:06 amAs a present to the world to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, the NRO has declassified its 25-year-old spy-satellite programmes GAMBIT (KH-7 and KH-8) and HEXAGON (KH-9)
http://www.nro.gov/foia/declass/GAMBHEX.html
These are the ones that took photos on film and then returned them to Earth in containers that look a little like Mercury space-capsules; KH-9 is a survey satellite, and is an enormous beast: three metres diameter, too long to fit in the Space Shuttle cargo bay, and with two 2000mm f/4 lenses taking images onto a hundred kilometres of 16.5cm-wide film.
KH-8 is a smaller satellite containing a bigger camera (110cm-diameter main mirror, so half the size of Hubble, fed by a larger 45-degree mirror with a hole in the middle), with 3.75km of 12.5cm film.
Probably the documents with the greatest potential of having interesting lines to read between are http://www.nro.gov/history/csnr/gambhex/Vol%20IIIA%20GAMBIT.pdf and http://www.nro.gov/history/csnr/gambhex/Vol%20IIIB%20HEXAGON.pdf which are the few-hundred-page official histories of the programmes.
The prices and the exact locations of the places the development was done have been redacted.
It's interesting to note that the early Lunar Survey workup for Apollo was done using cameras from a 1960 spy satellite, 'provided through clandestine channels' - I suspect the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter currently in orbit around that planet has an awful lot of spy-satellite heritage too, though more openly produced (in that the aerospace contractor Bell provided the MRO optics and also clearly provides a lot of optics to unspecified customers)
http://www.nro.gov/foia/declass/GAMBHEX.html
These are the ones that took photos on film and then returned them to Earth in containers that look a little like Mercury space-capsules; KH-9 is a survey satellite, and is an enormous beast: three metres diameter, too long to fit in the Space Shuttle cargo bay, and with two 2000mm f/4 lenses taking images onto a hundred kilometres of 16.5cm-wide film.
KH-8 is a smaller satellite containing a bigger camera (110cm-diameter main mirror, so half the size of Hubble, fed by a larger 45-degree mirror with a hole in the middle), with 3.75km of 12.5cm film.
Probably the documents with the greatest potential of having interesting lines to read between are http://www.nro.gov/history/csnr/gambhex/Vol%20IIIA%20GAMBIT.pdf and http://www.nro.gov/history/csnr/gambhex/Vol%20IIIB%20HEXAGON.pdf which are the few-hundred-page official histories of the programmes.
The prices and the exact locations of the places the development was done have been redacted.
It's interesting to note that the early Lunar Survey workup for Apollo was done using cameras from a 1960 spy satellite, 'provided through clandestine channels' - I suspect the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter currently in orbit around that planet has an awful lot of spy-satellite heritage too, though more openly produced (in that the aerospace contractor Bell provided the MRO optics and also clearly provides a lot of optics to unspecified customers)
