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Originally Posted by RWebb
Mike did not discuss image enhancement techniques...
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It's information theory...you cannot make something appear in the image that is not in the datastream. Image enhancement is no where near what is shown on TV.
I'll give them some SERIOUS leeway here, and say that the military might be able to have a 1 inch resolution at the surface of the Earth. That's using the best technology, AND actively adaptive optics, AND a low orbit, AND taking sub-second images. Again, that simply means that under idea contrast, they could tell 2 dots 1 inch apart (it looks like an oval instead of a circle, it does NOT look like 2 dots...but that oval is considered "resolved").
This precludes facial recognition, as well as imaging license plates and newspapers.
As for planes...they couldn't do adaptive optical systems on a plane, I'd put plane based imaging as LOWER that "ideal" satellite imaging right now.