[Mamzelle]

Nasa makes an official claim that the military couldn't have taken pics that were high enough res to see anything of use--didn't believe this when I heard it. Now we have a "we could SO take a good pic" from the military. Figured this was coming--the AF satellite engineers aren't just going to sit still for such a claim. But the brass is hanging on to their pic.

Now, whether Nasa also had these pics is an interesting question. Or could they had gotten them if they had wanted them, and chose not to ask?

[Cold Heat]

--didn't believe this when I heard it.

Please don't get off the topic of what they were referring to.

What they were saying is that a two dimensional view of the bottom, top or any flat surface would not have the depth to see anything except a mark or discoloration. The tiles are as much as 4" thick. The pic will not show depth. They will see a mark(maybe) but not a gouge or to put another way, 3.75 inches or tile might be missing but they could never verify it from a two dimensional view.

Ever see a pic of the moon and think the craters are mounds instead of holes?

[Vic3O3]

If NASA's claiming the USAF doesn't have hi-res cameras that's plain BS! They had the AF specifically take ground based photos of an EARLY shuttle launch that was thought to have tile damage. They rolled the shuttle over to present a good target to the camera and saw enough to allay their fears. And that was in the early 1980's.

[Vinnie_Vidi_Vici]

My impression is that the picture was taken by the Sloan Digital sky survey camera at Apache point on the white sands reservation, it a civilian camera used for automated deep space photography and asteroid finder. I believe they were just testing the tracking mechanism on the shuttle when they got the picture. the camer has a .6 meter lens and a 150 megapixel CCD camera.