I was just reading a book to put my 4 year old to sleep, and there is a part where there is a satellite that took a picture of pluto, considering how far pluto is, how can the satellite send the images back to earth with that distance?
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When it comes to earth satellites they just use Kodak film and develop in a lab. I’m not joking
My dad worked for the ASA, essentially the military version of the NSA. He started as a cryptographer in the late 1950s but moved over to computer programming by the mid1960s. Once he told me, while drunk, about a project he worked on while at the pentagon. It was for the first spy satellites that the US used. I remember he told me that they were just really big film cameras and when all the film was used up they just dropped the film in a bucket from orbit and a plane would pick it up. I just figured he was drunk and pulling my leg.
Imagine my surprise when I was doing some googling on OPs question to find out that yes, the military had a series of film satellites where they literally just dropped the film in essentially a big bucket (some of which had “Classified” stenciled on them) from orbit with a parachute and a plane would snag it out of the sky before it landed. They used special 70mm Kodak film and the buckets would contain anywhere between 2 to 6 miles of film. Kodak had a lab set up that would only develop this film.
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