Could you build a satellite like the JWST, point it at earth and have it be a super crazy reconnaissance satellite?
Could you build a satellite like the JWST, point it at earth and have it be a super crazy reconnaissance satellite?
Could you build a satellite like the JWST, point it at earth and have it be a super crazy reconnaissance satellite?
And how near infrared will be helpful to detect shit on earth?
goes trough clouds, smoke and fine dust
The united states already has this technology in orbit. The hard part is getting satellite to track their target form more that 10 seconds as they move in their orbit.
There are plenty of geos stationary satellites with 420x optical zoom that can read your licence plate from 25,000 miles away
They're not using the JWST design overall specifically, that one is super super optimized for specific IR bands so that it can look at red shifted ultra distant stars/galaxies etc. You don't need its super sunshade and ultra cooling system at all for vis for example.
do lagrange points really count as "in orbit"?
i feel like they are just so far out there, that they have graduated from "orbit" to "deep space"
I would orbit those girls, if you catch my drift
largange are 3 body orbits
JWST also orbits the earth in a circle but it's trajectory wouldnt fit a 2 body equation
That's literally what most optical spy satellites are anon. They're basically space telescopes that look back at Earth as opposed to objects in space.
thats what hubble was
yes
that being said JWST is thermally designed for L2
you could make an earth sensing sat with the same sort of big mirror but it would need a different sensor and sunshield and it would only be able to work on the sun side of earth with the mirror pointing permanently away from the sun like JWST
They already have super crazy recon sats anon. The hubble was originally from extremely outdated and primitive spy sat tech. Since spy sats are visible wavelengths (or radio but that's totally different tech) and vastly closer to their targets they can be smaller and still be incredible. JWST isn't really a great design for a spysat, too complex, the line patterns its design produces to enable maximum photon gathering power are a tradeoff when that's not important, it's big and visible, etc.
Not that the DOD won't be taking full advantage of Starship once that's really going. Tune in to watch that thing in hopefully just 3 more days, however well it works or doesn't it'll be an Apollo moment in our lifetime, and incredible sight and dawn of a new era. And the enormous faring and mass budget will be put to US military use for sure amongst others, though a lot of it may be spent on fuel to let sats maneuver around more aggressively and longer.
I could not
JWST is not optimized for looking back at the earth.
1) It collects infrared more than visible light which is bad for going through the atmosphere.
2) There probably is very limited earth orbits you can put it in and still use it. It needs to get crazy cold on one side to be useful.
3) Looking at very distant things is a completely different optimization problem than looking at earth in greater detail.
So instead they just put things in LEO. You don't need something crazy to get good images down to where cars are visible and somewhat identifiable. Having coverage is probably more important at that point because LEO orbits are not synchronous with the earth's rotation, so you need multiple satellites to be able to look at something continuously.
usually it goes the other way around
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA
SHHHHHH shut uuuup!
No matter how great the resolution,
No matter how big the satellite,
It will never get much clearer than what we can achieve now due to the fact that there's about 13 miles worth of atmosphere in the way. Dust, heatwaves, atmospheric lensing, all keeps satellites from seeing less than a few inches per pixel.
>Technically, it could also see details as small as a U.S. penny at a distance of about 25 miles.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/james-webb-space-telescope-fun-facts/
So, 300 miles up for a low earth orbit, would have resolution 12 pennies wide, or 9 inches.
Something the size of the JWST couldn't ever resolve anything smaller than 4cm across from low earth in visible light, no matter how tigh the instrumentation is. Space telescopes are large to collect light, they're not zoom machines like some of the morons in this thread seem to believe. An instrument in geostationary orbit will need a 3km across mirror at a minimum to read a number plate.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA
I wouldn't think about it too much
yea maybe they could even use it find your wiener
No because the heat of the sun would absolutely ruin the delicate instruments.