In Tony Scott's film "Enemy of the State", Will Smith and Gene Hackman have the greatest difficulty in escaping the surveillance of CIA satellites, capable of detecting and tracking with extraordinary precision, a vehicle by its license plate. But that's cinema...
In reality, although modern electro-optical reconnaissance satellites now have a very high resolution, allowing them to detect objects as small as 30 cm, they cannot recognize faces or read car plates. Above all, they are incapable of effectively detecting and tracking moving targets, such as cars, and even less so, planes.
Yet this is the objective that the US Space Force has just set for itself, through the voice of General Michael Guetlein, second in command of space operations, during a press conference on September 4, 2024.
In this section:
AWACS and E-8 Joint STARS aircraft now vulnerable to symmetrical adversary
This objective, very ambitious, is the consequence of a now unavoidable observation, partly resulting from the lessons of the air war in Ukraine. Indeed, the Russian air forces lost, in this conflict, two Awacs A-50 Mainstay aircraft, shot down by Ukrainian long-range anti-aircraft guns (according to Kyiv).
At the same time, the Russian Air Force demonstrated the effectiveness of the R-37M very long-range air-to-air missile, designed to engage and destroy aircraft such as AWACS and tanker aircraft at a range of up to 400 km. This threat echoes the entry into service in China of long-range air-to-air missiles such as the PL-15 and the PL-21, whose ranges are said to reach 250 and 400 km respectively.
Finally, in Russia as in China, very long-range surface-to-air systems, such as the Russian S-400 and S-500, and the Chinese HQ-9, create a protection bubble of 300 km or more, forcing support aircraft, such as tankers, and especially Awacs, to operate at greater distances from the engagement zones.
However, the effectiveness of the American armed forces, and Western forces by extension, rests largely on the capabilities of their air forces, which themselves rest on the effectiveness of their advanced air detection aircraft, such as the US Air Force's E-3 Sentry, soon to be replaced by the E-7 Wedgetail, and the US Navy's E-2D Hawkeye, as well as the E-8 Joint STARS, designed to detect, identify and track ground targets.
By forcing these aircraft to operate further from the lines of engagement, to remain out of range of the enemy's air defenses and their interceptors armed with long-range missiles, the Russian and Chinese armies therefore have an effective solution to weaken, overall, the military and operational potential of the American and Western armed forces.
The US Space Force wanted satellites capable of detecting and tracking air, sea and land targets, starting in the early 30s.
This is precisely where US Space now wants to provide significant operational added value. Created in 2019, the US Space Force is the 6th armed force of the United States. It is in charge, as its name suggests, of all the space resources of the American armed forces, but is struggling, as is often the case for new armies or new commands, to fully find its place in the Pentagon hierarchy, especially since the other armies have retained control over certain specific space resources.
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the laws of diffraction (optical / electromagnetic are the same thing) are implacable and SAR technologies provide a fairly limited response. To have a centimeter resolution, you need either a "window" size 10 times larger (Mirror, ultralight, rigid and stable 10m+, material problem, etc.) or divide the altitude by 10 (flight time, target) and fly in a swarm (costs) or go into the UUV (atm transmission, aerial source) or even more exotic
The U2 problem was found before the deployment of the KH11 in 1970.
Expendable drone swarms launched “as needed” over an area “flying” around 60 or 80 feet
Interconnected seems to me to be a serious avenue
The topic here seems to me to be more about being able to process the received images in real time to detect targets (by movement, for example, like tyrannosaurs 😉 ), than about seeking increased resolution. My opinion is that this transformation will rely more on improving flow analysis capabilities, through the arrival of AI and/or quantum chips, than on improving resolution, which would not bring much added value anyway.
I understand what you are saying. Interesting. Indeed, a radar echo, in Doppler mode, allows in theory and often in practice 2 to capture the speed vector and the altitude of a mobile without having a high resolution. The cross-referencing with other information allows to fill the identification gaps hence the importance of the network
To take your initial example, we do not read the license plate, but we deduce it because we have all the drivers present through our cell phones and we can also associate a license plate with any driver using a database. (This is an example to help you understand the process)