Donald Trump Reveals Secrets About US Spy Satellites On Twitter By Chance

On Twitter, US President Donald Trump has recently posted a photo revealing Semnan Launch Site One in Iran. According to US authorities, a rocket failure occurred in this location.

The photo apparently provided much more information to astronomy experts than to anyone else. They analyzed the camera angle to determine what kind of spy satellite was used to take it, as well as the time of the shooting.

One day before Donald Trump posted the photo on his Twitter, Marco Langbroek, an asteroid tracker and astronomer in the Netherlands, said that the photo may have been captured by a two-billion-dollar satellite called USA 224. It is also said to belong to one of the most secretive reconnaissance satellites in the world.

In 2011, the KH-11 optical imaging satellite was launched and until now, amateur trackers and astronomers can observe it without any difficulty.

As a Purdue University graduate student in astrodynamics, Michael Thompson said to NPR, “They’re super bright in the sky and are easy to find.”

In fact, some astronomers feel baffled by the photo’s too high resolution. Quartz revealed that current calculations could only handle the resolution of a photo at a 10cm/pixel; however, the latest commercial satellites put the photo’s resolution at 30 cm/pixel.

Langbroek posted on a blog: