It might help if you understand that the 'Australian' satellite images you've seen are generally, in fact, from American satellites. Australia doesn't actually have its own surveillance satellites - we have a handful of communications satellites but that's it.
Because the joint US/Australian base at Pine Gap in central Australia, is a downlink location for satellite data, Australia often has access to American satellite feeds, but in this case, the images came from a commercial satellite, WorldView-2 owned by American company DigitalGlobe.
Australians did the analysis of the images which made the first ID of possible debris, and geographically was in the best location to launch the initial search of that area, so the announcement came from Australia, but they are not actually Australian satellite images, despite the way some of the media is reporting them.
Thank you for the info.
So we retired the SR71 because satellites could do a better job? I find it hard to believe that after several days we cannot get a clear satellite image of whats floating in the ocean. Especially pieces over 70’ in length.
What was all that stuff about being able to read a license plate? Something else is at play here.