I've heard tales of the wink and a nod method of releasing capabilities without broadcasting that's what they were doing. Back in the early days of satellite with ground penetrating radar, there were detailed images released of river deltas. It was supposed to be a boon for geology, but it was also meant as a shot across the bow to the Russians that we could see their underground bunkers and what not. Sometimes the clandestine games were cool. I miss the spy novels/stories of the 80s.

No one was dumbfounded. Image clarity was consistent with expectations based on the known size of the KH-11 series. This is basic physics.

“The resolution is amazingly high,” Ankit Panda from the Federation of American Scientists told NPR, adding it was “much higher than anything I’ve ever seen.”

Tell it to Ankit Panda.

Melissa Hanham, deputy director of the Open Nuclear Network at the One Earth Foundation, believes that the resolution is so high, it may be beyond the physical limits at which satellites can operate.

And this lady.

You have misunderstood. Ankit Panda was simply stating that the image resolution was higher than anything that had been publicly released so far. It wasn't anything unexpected.

Melissa Hanham is a policy specialist, not a physicist or optics engineer. She has no particular expertise in this area.

If you don't believe me then do the math yourself. It's easy enough to figure out the maximum diameter of a KH-11 based on the size of the available launch vehicles. And from that you can calculate the maximum resolving power. They can play some tricks with adaptive optics and digital image processing but that doesn't add much.

The minimum size of KH-11 mirrors has been common knowledge for many years now, since it influenced the Hubble telescope. From the book Power To Explore -- History of Marshall Space Flight Center 1960-1990:

> "In addition, changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites."

PDF: https://web.archive.org/web/20170205104821/https://history.m...

They're 2.4 meters at their smallest, with later KH-11's possibly being larger. But even 2.4 meters is enough to get way better image quality than has been publicly released.