![]() ![]() From 100 miles in orbit, those pictures clearly showed objects as small as 2 feet wide (61 centimeters.)Īlthough some of Google Earth’s images shot from aircraft are very clear and show people on the ground like Hexagon’s, that’s not the case with Google Earth’s color photos from satellites. They created photos showing 370-mile swaths of the planet. One reason their cameras captured so much detail was because they were big.Įach satellite was the size of a school bus and weighed 30,000 pounds. The US National Reconnaissance Office launched 20 Hexagons between 19. Read the National Reconnaissance Office’s declassified file on Hexagon The Hexagon program is part of a legacy of American spies in the sky stretching from the 1950s to today, aimed at finding early warning signs about potential threats to the US. Hexagon photos allowed US intelligence analysts to conclusively count numbers of Soviet troops, tanks, aircraft and missiles to make sure Moscow wasn’t violating arms control treaties. “I honestly think that the Hexagon program was responsible for preventing World War III,” Pressel said. He was a top engineer at Massachusetts-based Perkin-Elmer, designer and builder of Hexagon’s cameras – which played a huge role in protecting the United States during the Cold War. “These were much better pictures than Google Earth,” Phil Pressel told CNN’s “Declassified.” The intelligence community called this program Big Bird and Keyhole-9, but its codename was Hexagon. In a pre-digital era more than 30 years before Google Earth, an ultrasecret US satellite program spied on other countries by taking much higher quality photos of the planet’s surface. ![]() Sorry to break it to you, but Google Earth ain’t all that. ![]()
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