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Photos: A satellite spy in the skies
For all the Pentagon's crowing about its success in hitting a defunct spy satellite with a missile last week, it's had very little to say about the satellite itself. But then, those Defence Department types aren't in the habit of giving away details about classified projects.
One thing we do know is that the satellite was flying under the auspices of the US government's National Reconnaissance Office. As it turns out, the NRO has been overseeing spy satellites for a half-century now. Its early efforts were declassified in the mid-1990s, and the grainy picture you see on this page is what the NRO describes as the "first imagery" taken by its once highly secret Corona satellite; it shows the Mys Shmidta Air Field in the Soviet Union on 18 August 1960.
Caption text by News.com's Jonathan Skillings.
Credit: National Reconnaissance Office
Based on Images: First U.S. spy satellite photos--ever! on CNET News
