Trump decided he’d take a cellphone picture from his intel briefing of the hardcopy print from some type of surveillance image. The reflection from taking a cellphone picture of a hardcopy print (or screen display/projection image) is included in the tweeted image and many folks decided to decipher all aspects of the picture, aside from the possibility that classified intel was being blurted out because Trump wanted to taunt Iran.
You can see the outline, and with some imagination you could say it’s the top of Trump’s head because of the stupid hair, but it certainly could be someone else who got delegated, like Dan Scavino, because this is Caddyshack 45*.
What’s important is that it’s classified intel misused even by the person who could immediately “declassify” it. Just because he could nuke a hurricane doesn’t mean he should do it.
It could be a drone’s photo with the USA 224 KH-11 satellite overhead, whose path is being used to cover its plausibility. “Why, we don’t fly drones (or spy planes) over Iran, nosiree”.
Update: the current hypothesis is now that during that briefing the cellphone picture was taken of an image on a projection screen since the reflection also includes cues of the room.
The image shows the aftermath of an accident with an Iranian Safir rocket at the El Khomeini Spaceport. From the features of the launch pad, I find that the viewing directions of the camera match that of USA 224, a classified spy satellite.
There are 4 towers around the launch pad. Google Earth shows that the North and South towers are aligned along 192 deg azimuth. The camera azimuth is a further ~4 degrees West. From the elliptical shape of the circular launch pad, the elevation of the camera is around 46 degrees.
This is the path USA 224 followed across the sky from El Khomeini Spaceport on August 29, 2019. At 09:44:20, it passed very close to azimuth 196 deg and elevation 46 deg, matching the camera position. At that time, it was at a distance of 382 km.
Since USA 224 is a classified satellite, orbital elements are not published by CSpOC. Fortunately, amateur satellite observers regularly track it across the sky, allowing its orbit to be determined. At the time of the image, the USA 224 orbit was last determined 2.4 days before.
It is not often that images from US Keyhole spy satellites are published. These satellites have 2.4m mirrors (as large as that of the Hubble telescope), and are believed to produce the sharpest images of the Earth's surface. The actual resolution of the images is kept secret.
Now that this image has been published, with the orbit of the satellite known, will enable some estimates of the resolution of the Keyhole satellites. Four of them are currently in orbit, USA 186, USA 224 , USA 245 and USA 290. See
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Ken… for more info.
My analysis of the USA 224 picture of the Safir launch failure (with python code), is available at
.
mentions Google Earth shows that the launch pad is about 60m in diameter, while the launch pad is about 600 pixels wide in the picture. That suggests a resolution of at least 10cm per pixel, as the original image could have had a higher resolution.
mentions This resolution is for a range of 382 km. The perigee of Keyhole satellites like USA 224 is around 260 km, so the theoretical resolution could be a factor 1.5 better.
mentions One open question is whether USA 224 observed the El Khomeini Spaceport to track the Safir launch preparations, or to check the aftermath of the failure? Do we know when the failure happened? It must have been before 09:44UTC…
There are other hypotheses.