Spy Agency’s Challenge: How To Sort A Million Photos A Day. March 12, 2020, 11:00 AM ET, Heard on All Things Considered
“When the U.S. government took its first satellite photos in 1960, it wasn’t easy getting those pictures back to Earth. After the satellite took the pictures, the film was dropped from space in a capsule attached to a parachute. A military plane with a large hook flew by to collect the capsule in midair over the Pacific Ocean. ‘”They called the pilots who flew these missions ‘star catchers,’ because they were catching what looked like stars falling from the sky,” said Katie Donegan, with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA.’
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/12/807499102/a-spy-agencys-challenge-how-to-sort-a-million-photos-a-day
“Intelligence based upon the Earth’s physical and man-made attributes-and the art and science of interpreting that information-began to change well before the tragedy of September 11, 2001. By combining America’s most advanced imagery and geospatial assets within the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) in 1996, our nation created a much-needed critical mass of skills and technologies under a single mission umbrella. As a result, the intelligence community was able to take its geospatial products to a new level. With the creation of NGA in 2003, this area of intelligence took another leap forward, allowing us to integrate multiple sources of information, intelligence and tradecrafts to produce an innovative and sophisticated new discipline that then NGA director James Clapper formally christened as geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT.” https://www.nga.mil/About/History/Pages/default.aspx
A librarian reported to GPO that the agency has issued some planning documents not in the Federal Depository Library Program. Also under the History section, the agency provides historical photos, e.g. the Cuban Missile Crisis, for important historical times. https://www.nga.mil/About/History/CubanMissileCrisis/Pages/default.aspx
co-published on govdoc-l and freegovinfo.info.
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