The Politburo Diktat

I agree we should be skeptical, but it is not unusual that this road would be watched; the Bagdad airport road is infamous for being one of the most frequently targeted roads in Iraq.

The photos could be a few seconds apart; doesn't have to be live streaming.

Someone at Wizbang had an interesting comment:

Rusty Shackleford (Jawa) is indeed skeptical, but his knowledge of physics and satellite imagery leaves a lot to be desired.

He states that speed = distance x time; this is a very basic physics equation, but he got it wrong: Speed = distance / time.

OK, so maybe he was just in a hurry. But he also states that the only way to determine the speed is from two different pictures taken at two different points in time. He finds it unlikely that the same satellite would have bothered to take two pictures of the same vehicle.

But it doesn't have to be two pictures. A single exposure has a "shutter-time" that will, particularly at night, result in a little blurring of a moving object. By knowing the shutter time and measuring the length of the blur, an incredibly accurate measurement of speed can be conducted.

I have doubts about Rusty's doubts.

Posted by: Ponytailed Conservative at May 1, 2005 09:40 PM

One quick observation:

The redacted portion of the document (which I did not read) is reportedly classified "S-NF"... I believe that, in order to protect sources and methods, any intel derived from a spy satellite would be receive a higher classification. That might explain why there was no reference to the satellite image(s) in that document.

To say, "Our satellite shows X, Y, and Z." would tell adversaries what our overhead capabilities are.

j.p.

I don't think it was satellite imagery. I think it was an AWACS or a drone.

AWACS can track vehicles - they just can't track them in real-time, and some of the reports seem to have indicated that this information was gathered from "tapes." I'm pretty confident that they had two radar sweeps from an AWACS, and those two sweeps showed the car moving a significant distance in the interval.

Drone's a possibility, especially if they have stills or video, but apparently the weather that night wasn't the best, so I'd discount the possibility of visuals.

AWACS does not do ground MTI targets
JSTARS, however does. doppler radar only requires one ping for speed, it requires more for prediction of future locations for targeting.

Imagery blur is useless without a reference. A later attack caught by the same Sat with a vehicle of known speed would have given them the reference. From there, they could relook at old imagery and interpret the speed. Basic Imagery interpretation, it worked that way with simple plain light photography in the '80s it works the same way with Modern Sats.

Take a look at maps.google.com or keyhole.google.com for the capabilities of the unclassed Sat Imagery. You can see moving arget blur on some of the high resolution shots if you zoom in enough.

But see it's all a misunderstanding, the car was only speeding before it wasn't speeding, but it all really depends on what the definition of "is" is.