Can a satalite look though a window?

[ZooNamedGames]

Dude, just stop making new threads if you don't have anything important to say/ask.

I said I made a mistake. Besides, today was bad day... Tomorrow I'll make another thread, and everyone will be happy. How do I know? 'Cause I've got experience, just I slipped and made a bad post.... Which became another.... Then another.

Today was just bad in general, and as a recommendation, tell me rather than to stop completely, why not comment on one of my threads? Talk to me there, not demand. This typically has a better effect and it also relates back to my main point, it was a bad day.

[KASASpace]

Umm, YES, it can.

In fact, there was once a case were a mapping satellite saw a woman through a window.

That woman, if I remember correctly, would sue the satellite guys. (I don't know which commercial organization)

[Seret]

This thread is odd.

A satellite can see anything it has an unobstructed line of sight to, just like anything else. In reality lines of sight very low on the horizon are likely to be significantly obscured in a lot of wavelengths (visible, IR, etc) due to having to peer through a particularly fat slice of the atmosphere, and obviously things will be heavily masked by terrain.

[KerbMav]

Can you guys just let the thread DIE?? I made a mistake!

That would be to easy and no fun at all!

[rdfox]

Umm, YES, it can.

In fact, there was once a case were a mapping satellite saw a woman through a window.

That woman, if I remember correctly, would sue the satellite guys. (I don't know which commercial organization)

I find this unlikely, due to issues of angular resolution. It's generally agreed that the highest-resolution photographic reconnaissance satellites out there are the NRO's Advanced KH-11 and its derivatives, which are essentially Hubble telescopes aimed at the Earth (albeit with somewhat different sensor packages). Orbiting very low (~100 miles/160 kilometers--and thus requiring frequent replacement as they deorbit due to orbital decay), they have roughly the same angular resolution as the HST, and while I'm not gonna go through all the math to show it, this works out to a resolution, under ideal conditions, of about three inches (7.5 cm) in their imagery. That is assuming you're looking vertically down at the site of interest, and that the atmosphere is perfectly transmissive on that day (it never is). While higher-resolution cameras are possible, there's no actual advantage to using them, since atmospheric refraction is enough that you wouldn't really get any better imagery than that--even with theoretical angular resolution for the camera that gets you down to the atoms-per-pixel range, the turbulent "soup" of the atmosphere would still blur it down to about that same level.

At a low oblique angle, like you'd need to see through a window (or, more usefully to a recon satellite, read a car's license plate from orbit), angular resolution and atmospheric refraction combine to give a net resolution of about one foot (30 centimeters) or so. So an NRO spy satellite could make out that there's a person in the window, but wouldn't have enough resolution to make out whether they're male or female (it'd basically see a string of five or six roughly person-colored pixels, one pixel wide). Commercial mapping satellites tend to be no better than about 25 centimeters resolution when shooting vertically (most of them actually go for 1m resolution), partly because their customers tend not to need spy satellite-level resolution, and partly because the lower angular resolution requirement allows them to cover a much broader area with the same amount of CCD sensor, allowing them to get full coverage on a more frequent basis and to cost less. (It's like the difference between binoculars and a telescope--the binoculars don't give you as much magnification, but they give you a much wider field of view, whereas the telescope gives you a lot more magnification, but at the cost of essentially looking through a drinking straw, in terms of how wide an area you can see...)

[OgreMagi]

light sails well an idea I like was ....

build a base on mercury, with large solar panels to redirect light, then use that light to focus it on a sail. work well but you would need refractors say above the plane of the solar system to refract the light to where you want to send it. but yea that would work.

read about an idea of using a ship with a magnetic field that would ride the solar wind, in theory it would work but cannot remember the details.