The San Francisco Chronicle October 16, 2001 Eyes in the sky over Taliban are sharpest ever;
New satellites let forces in field instantly see big picture or details
By David Perlman
Intelligence analysts hunting Taliban bases and troop movements with globe-circling satellites have significantly improved their eyesight since the Gulf War a decade ago, experts say.
Improved high-speed computer connections can instantly flash full-color scenes to battle commanders at sea and on the ground, making satellite images far more useful today than ever before.
Technical changes have been "revolutionary," said John Pike, head of a nonprofit space and defense analysis center called GlobalSecurity.org, and a former space and weapons expert at the Federation of American Scientists.
The Pentagon will not reveal how many military spy satellites are now in orbit, nor how sharp their eyes are. But Pike estimates that there may be as many as six or seven, all probably capable of resolving objects less than a foot in size. "Ten years ago," Pike said during an interview, "analysts at intelligence centers were still using black-and-white monitors, and in Desert Storm they were sending images out one at a time to commanders on the ground by fax. Now, with distributed high-speed computer connections, those images can be moved around really fast and simultaneously to all units that need them."
Lew Franklin, a retired vice president of TRW Inc., a major aerospace defense contractor, and an affiliate member of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, said the armed forces can also glean valuable data from commercial and other government satellite networks.
Many of these images are for sale around the world and find a wide variety of uses. The U.S. Geological Survey, for example, gathers Earth-resources data from Landsat satellites that map entire continents in wide swaths. American commercial satellites are widely used for mapping, monitoring changes in forests and croplands, and even locating large schools of tuna across oceans.
The resolution of those satellites may be as wide as 30 meters -- about 100 feet -- but for the armed forces that is good enough to reveal buildings, power plants and airfields. Such information is also invaluable for mapping the terrain of a land like Afghanistan where large-scale maps are known to be inaccurate.
Satellites that scan the land in infrared wavelengths can assess bomb damage, and radar-equipped satellites can penetrate clouds and desert dust storms, Franklin said.
"Weather satellites can be useful for timing attacks," he added. "It's worth remembering that people can be pinned down by the weather, too."
DETAIL NOT ALWAYS NEEDED
William E. Stoney, a satellite specialist at a nonprofit company in McLean, Va., called Mitretek Systems whose clients include the Air Force and NASA, said fine detail is not always what the military needs.
Military satellites can image objects with a resolution of "well less than a meter and probably down to centimeters," Stoney said. But these satellites focus narrowly and aren't useful for observing wide areas of terrain.
During the Gulf War, Stoney noted, the resolution of satellite images was limited to about 10 meters in black and white and 20 meters in color, but today's images capture at least 10 times more detail.
Among the most effective systems for one-meter imagery now in orbit are the French "Spot" commercial satellites and an American system called Ikonos, built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Sunnyvale and operated by Denver-based Space Imaging Inc.
Some recent Ikonos images are now being made available free on the Space Imaging Web site, www.spaceimaging.com.
A new commercial satellite called Quickbird, owned by the DigitalGlobe Corp. in Longmont, Colo., is scheduled to be launched later this week from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Quickbird is said to provide images with the highest resolution of any civilian satellite -- down to about two feet in black and white or eight feet in color and infrared wavelengths.
IMAGE ANALYSIS HAS IMPROVED
Along with sharper-eyed satellites, military planners also have much more powerful analytical tools to make sense of the data sent back to Earth.
Specialized optical filters, for example, can bring out many previously invisible details -- shadows and ruts from tanks, for example. By combining different satellite images of the same scene, analysts can reveal all sorts of unsuspected detail, Franklin said, although the precise techniques involved are classified.
And it is not only satellites that provide crucial images, Franklin said.
Drones, the small unmanned aircraft that fly low by remote control, are taking close-up images over Afghan territory.
Cameras in the nose cones of cruise missiles, the "smart weapons" of modern warfare, transmit images of their targets right up to the moment they hit. They can also send back close-ups of the target's immediate surroundings -- other buildings, for example, or structures such as oil tanks and airport towers that might become fresh targets.
Copyright 2001 The Chronicle Publishing Co.
