The United States has just announced the creation of an intelligence squad dedicated to threatening satellites and the ground stations that support them, in orbit there is a fight between various powers but unlike conflicts on the ground we do not find out, only some astrophotographers are what skilled enough to see what's going on up there from the comfort of their backyards.
The spy hubble is part of this invisible war that happens in orbit program 10 10, aka Kennen, aka crystal, but its real name keyhole - 11 or KH-11, this space telescope is a spy satellite that is dedicated to precisely that, use the impressive optical power that its nerdy twin the hubble has to see the most distant Galaxies in the universe, to spy on potential enemies of the United States and their activities.
Actually, Hubble does not have a single spy replica, 18 units of the KH-11 have been built, not counting one that was destroyed during launch, six of them are still active in orbit and each of them passes over our heads once every four. days, this means that they can obtain images of anything anywhere at least once a day, this is used to monitor troop movement, construction of facilities or vehicles such as planes, submarines and aircraft carriers.
Every time there is an expensive space project dedicated to science like the James Webb Space Telescope that cost 10 billion dollars, the uncomfortable question arises, is such an expensive telescope really needed, is this expense justified in the United States budget, the hubble cost half of what the james webb cost adjusting for inflation and 19 spy versions of it were built for military purposes, you really don't have to question your spending on science when you spend these impressive amounts on defense.
If the hubble was pointed at the earth you would not see anything, the fastest exposure of its cameras is one tenth of a second in that period of time the hubble moves 700 meters and is not capable of following objects on the ground while moving so so the image would just be a blur, but even if you could track the same object on the ground for that long it would be blurry because hubble has its optics and instruments permanently focused at infinity and objects on the ground would be out of range. focus.
The sensors of your cameras were designed to see the faintest and most distant Galaxies and nebulae, not to see the glowing rocks of the mountains of Afghanistan, so maybe your cameras would be damaged, for this reason your KH-11 spy clones despite from having similar sizes and optics to Hubble, they have several differences each KH-11 has tanks with a capacity of 3.5 tons of hydrazine for its thrusters that allow it to turn quickly to follow a target on the ground, the hubble does not do that so with some wheels of reaction that work with electricity generated by its solar panels is enough to keep you observing fixed points in space for hours when you need to take long exposure photographs
Their orbits are also very different, Hubble orbits at an altitude of 540 kilometers while the KH-11s have lower orbits that pass through the poles between 200 and 400 kilometers in altitude, this also increases the atmospheric drag they suffer or is the atmosphere, despite being very tenuous at these altitudes, still slows down the objects in orbit and that causes them to fall over time, so these spy satellites have to use their boosters from time to time to raise their orbits and avoid fall back to earth.
But the optics of the KH-11 is practically the same as that of Hubble, a primary mirror of 2.4 meters in diameter, the size of the primary mirror is what decides the resolution that a telescope can have, that is, how sharp are the details that can see.
That same sharpness in a spy satellite with a primary mirror of the same size and the same focal length as Hubble can see a lot of detail on the surface, its images have a resolution of 7 centimeters per pixel, this means that it cannot distinguish your expensive, but it does know how much clothes are dried on your clothesline, it is a quality similar to that of Google Maps which are photographs taken from airplanes but the images of the KH-11 are updated daily, that is, Uncle Sam can see absolutely everything that Don't be covered by clouds with these telescopes with incredible detail and near real-time updates.
And this is nothing new, in fact, the first KH-11 was put into orbit in 1976, 14 years before Hubble, and it was the first Electro-Optical Space Telescope, which means that it was the first to have a digital camera on board. , espionage in space is almost as old as space flight.
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