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A comment on A huge fireball exploded in Earth's atmosphere in December, according to Nasa. Parent comment

Re:A huge fireball exploded in Earth's atmosphere in Decembe... by moftz on Monday March 18, 2019 @01:29PM (#19423097)
There are plenty of satellites out there that monitor for missile launches using IR cameras. These might detecting all of these meteor explosions and the military is not reporting them due to not wanting their operational capacity being known. The previous generation of missile detection missiles could see Scud launches during Desert Storm in 1991. I'm sure the military sees all kinds of weird space stuff and doesn't mention a word.

Latest generation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-Based_Infrared_System

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Re:A huge fireball exploded in Earth's atmosphere in Decembe... by daniel-cussen on Monday March 18, 2019 @02:30PM (#19423706)
Yep, they sent satellites to the moon in 1968 ahead of the Apollo mission. They had to noise the images they took so the world wouldn't know precisely their level of capability, but the photos taken of the entire moon had super high, crisp resolution.
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Re:A huge fireball exploded in Earth's atmosphere in Decembe... by coldtea on Monday March 18, 2019 @07:13PM (#19426301)
>but the photos taken of the entire moon had super high, crisp resolution.

At the time, wouldn't they be film based images? If so, well, obviously the resolution would be high and crisp, especially if it was medium/large format.

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Re:A huge fireball exploded in Earth's atmosphere in Decembe... by RcouF1uZ4gsC on Monday March 18, 2019 @07:49PM (#19426552)
These images were developed, digitized, compressed, and transmitted back to NASA from the Lunar orbiters. This article has the story of how they were recovered recently.

https://boingboing.net/2018/06/16/ampex-fr-900-drives.html

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