Ahhh...secret technology... anything that was secret 50 years ago is off the shelf now.
The laws of physics remain pretty much laws and not suggestions. Nothing that doesn't follow those laws works.
I know there have to be some photographers out there somewhere that can tell me how the numbers on this 'high resolution photography from space using 1963 film cameras' works by the numbers...I am serious about this, I must have some fundamental misunderstanding of how this works.
Now...Gordon Cooper was, as they say at NASA, "a steely eyed missile man". Those test pilots of that era were brilliant engineers on top of having more testosterone than any 10 men ought to have. If you don't think so, read the 'spam in a can" section of his Wikipedia entry at :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Cooper#Project_Mercury - the only things Gordon Cooper had that were bigger than his IQ were his cojones.
According to NASA (
https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/ch_6.html ) and Hasselblad (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasselblad), the official NASA camera used aboard Cooper's Mercury mission, Atlas 9, was a Hasselblad 500C with Zeiss lenses. This is a medium format camera which uses film that measures at 5.6 x 5.6cm/2 1/4" x 2 1/4". OK...so very good medium format film is said to have a resolution good enough (
Film Resolution: The Pixel Count of Film) that an equivalent digital camera would have to produce a 313 megapixel digital image to equal the resolution of Fuji ISO 50 film. (He also had aboard a 35mm hand-held camera for an experiment for the Univ of Minn:
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/camera-robot-35mm-ma-9-faith-7).
OK...now we have some numbers that we can do something with....313,000,000 pixels per frame -that's ~18,000 pixels x 18,000 pixels.
Here is one of the pictures that he took on the Faith 7 mission:
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/535509main_EarthObservations_full.jpg
If you were to take a photo from 120 miles altitude and narrowed your field to 20 miles by 20 miles (which is about 9 degrees wide) 20 miles is 105,600 feet. This means that every pixel-equivalent on these photographs will be (105,600'/18,000 pixels) 58.6' x 58.6' so~ 60 feet square.
The average ballast pile would be less than 4 pixels. I do not believe you can discern a shipwreck ballast pile or scatter pattern from 4 pixels.
I readily agree that if you affix a telephoto lens to a camera you can greatly increase the detail observed, but as you 'zoom in' you reduce your field of view and if Cooper was looking for nuclear threats of some kind, I doubt that he could aim the camera finely enough to capture photos of individual targets. Aiming a high magnification camera lens is no different than using a high magnification riflescope or handheld telescope...it is hard to hold it steady and even harder to aim at something very tiny a long, long ways off.
Did I miss something here? Some photographic hocus-pocus that they failed to mention as I went through school?
please! Someone enlighten me!
Great hospitality, food and friends, but not a damned word about what was or wasn't found. I made no effort to pry stories out of the unwilling, as I have no interest in being the cause of someone breaking their word, but had someone volunteered some info I'd have listened carefully and kept it to myself (for possible later use for my own selfish interests, of course). A number of my friends and associates have worked with this show in some capacity and I wish them all the best. I certainly believe Jim Sinclair when he said that they have proceeded to do the surveys, searches and identification/recovery work as it should be done.
