NASA appears to be pulling its SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest production plane ever made, out of retirement as the Trump administration teases its new line of hypersonic surveillance jets — but doubt…
Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible. I’d love to know what NASA has planned for it.
I like its lines, but realistically, I don’t know what you’d use it for unless you need extremely high-resolution images.
We know, from Trump’s probably-ill-advised tweet back in 2019, that we can do 10-centimeter resolution from reconaissance satellites like USA-224, near the physical limitations of light resolution.
During missions, the SR-71 operated at high speeds and altitudes (Mach 3.2 at 85,000 ft or 26,000 m)
The SR-71 operates at a tenth to a thirtieth USA-224’s altitude, so assuming comparable imaging systems (which I could believe) and that there aren’t stability or thermal issues (which I’d be less-certain of) it can get ten to thirty times the resolution of a KH11 satellite from the lower altitude. I’m not sure how much utility there is in reconnaissance to getting 1 cm or ⅓ cm resolution images instead of 10 cm.
I would just like to point out that while not confirmed, it has been speculated since the mid-2000s that the actual imaging resolution of the satellites is closer to 2mm. Or as the joke goes, we’ll figure out what brand of cigarettes you smoke by reading the filter.
I would say that that’s purely speculation. Physics won’t allow it. The diffraction limit basically limits the best resolution to about 10 cm (assuming an altitude of 200 km, blue light and a humongously large lens with a diameter of 1 m). It’s likely that they’re quite close to the diffraction limit and maybe they have even more extreme hardware than I would guess, but a two orders of magnitude better resolution isn’t happening anytime soon I think.
I like its lines, but realistically, I don’t know what you’d use it for unless you need extremely high-resolution images.
We know, from Trump’s probably-ill-advised tweet back in 2019, that we can do 10-centimeter resolution from reconaissance satellites like USA-224, near the physical limitations of light resolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-224
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird
The SR-71 operates at a tenth to a thirtieth USA-224’s altitude, so assuming comparable imaging systems (which I could believe) and that there aren’t stability or thermal issues (which I’d be less-certain of) it can get ten to thirty times the resolution of a KH11 satellite from the lower altitude. I’m not sure how much utility there is in reconnaissance to getting 1 cm or ⅓ cm resolution images instead of 10 cm.
I would just like to point out that while not confirmed, it has been speculated since the mid-2000s that the actual imaging resolution of the satellites is closer to 2mm. Or as the joke goes, we’ll figure out what brand of cigarettes you smoke by reading the filter.
I would say that that’s purely speculation. Physics won’t allow it. The diffraction limit basically limits the best resolution to about 10 cm (assuming an altitude of 200 km, blue light and a humongously large lens with a diameter of 1 m). It’s likely that they’re quite close to the diffraction limit and maybe they have even more extreme hardware than I would guess, but a two orders of magnitude better resolution isn’t happening anytime soon I think.