<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" American spy satellites have capturedan exhaustive array of images of the Earth. After all, they&amp;#039;ve been taking photographs since the early days of the space race. In the 1990s, when climate change and other earth-science issues came to the forefront, researchers began to realize that the government&amp;#039;s unparalleled satellite data could be a huge boon\u2014if scientists were allowed access to classified images. Jeff Dozier was one of the first permitted behind the veil of secrecy. In the early 1990s Dozier, then a prof at the University of California\u2013Santa Barbara, briefed Al Gore, then a senator from Tennessee, about the opportunities that intelligence satellite photos could present to science. Gore wrote a letter to then-CIA director Robert Gates (now the secretary of defense), and this effort gave birth to the Medea program. A few dozen scientists, Dozier included, gained clearance to view spy-satellite photos for their research, and shortly thereafter President Bill Clinton declassified all such photos taken before 1972. Here are five times that spy photos contributed to science, even when the photos themselves remained classified. 1. Ice Data Deluge  This past month, the whole world got to see the same pictures a select group of scientists have been poring over for years. The USGS released more than a thousand images taken by American intelligence satellites of the Arctic ice cover. Climate scientists were thrilled both by the number of photos and their quality. Even though the intelligence community lessened the resolution of its images down to about a meter to create these new unclassified versions (Dozier isn&amp;#039;t allowed to say how good the real versions are), they are still up to 30 times sharper than the best resolution available from NASA or commercial satellites. 2. Is Sudan&amp;#039;s Desert Expanding?  In 1996, a still-classified desert photo helped Medea scientists answer whether droughts were causing increased desertification of fertile lands in the North African country of Sudan. William Schlesinger and Nicholas Gramenopoulos found that despite the drought, there was not a large difference in the number of trees in the photos between 1943 and 1996. While the scientists&amp;#039; research found no signs of desertification, their paper did expressly raise the ethical question of doing scientific research with classified data. Research depends other scientists having the ability to repeat the findings of the original researchers and verify the results, but that couldn&amp;#039;t happen under the Medea system. Schlesinger and Gramenopoulos conceded that &amp;quot;limitations on access to the data make it impossible for the journal&amp;#039;s usual review process to assess all aspects of data quality, selection, or interpretation.&amp;quot; 3. The Ice Stream Runs Through It  NASA climate scientist Robert Bindschadler used declassified spy satellite data to study Antarctica&amp;#039;s ice streams, rivers of moving ice that travel from the center of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to the ocean. These rivers, scientists believed, could contribute to global sea level rise by rushing ice out to sea too quickly. But when Bindschadler and his team compared the activity of Ice Stream B in 1998 to spy satellite photos from decades earlier, the scientists found that the flows had slowed by half\u2014a totally unexpected behavior. That bit of good news, however, was mitigated by the fact that the stream had widened by 4 kilometers, which offset the fact that the ice was marching toward the sea at a slower rate. Furthermore, the other streams are speeding up. &amp;quot;We knew this one was strange,&amp;quot; Bindschadler says, but he still isn&amp;#039;t sure why. The stream could be in its death throes, getting ready to quit moving for good. Its odd behavior could be related to water moving underneath as well, he says. In the coming years other researchers plan to drill down into the ice and try to solve the mystery. 4. China&amp;#039;s Nukes and the Big Quake  The massive magnitude 8 earthquake that shook the Sichuan province of China in May 2008 left 69,000 dead and 4.3 million people homeless in its wake, and ecologists reported this month that it also destroyed 23 percent of the region&amp;#039;s panda habitat. Security experts had another worry\u2014the Sichuan province is home to many of China&amp;#039;s facilities for building and storing nuclear weapons. Despite the delicate nature of intelligence photos, President George W. Bush offered to share them with China to help its recovery team leaders find survivors. He also shared them with allies to help sort out whether there was any radioactive threat in the region.  5. The 20 Million-Pound Meteor  One of the first papers to come out of the Medea spy data was an analysis of the February 1994 meteor that landed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Intelligence satellite images caught a meteor entering the Earth&amp;#039;s atmosphere at an altitude of 54 kilometers. Thomas McCord&amp;#039;s analysis of these shots concluded that the impactor had a mass in excess of 1 million pounds, and as many as 20 million pounds. The satellite images also enabled him to estimate the meteor&amp;#039;s angle of entry and energy. Since the first Medea papers came out, Jeff Dozier says, the possibilities for spy satellite science have picked up. And while many images will stay classified, that doesn&amp;#039;t mean the scientific work can&amp;#039;t go on. For one, scientists can independently verify some of the information that Medea scientists glean from classified photos\u2014according to Dozier, tracking tree cover in Sudan is an example of something commercial satellites could double-check. Also, part of the Medea team&amp;#039;s work lies in giving a scientific assessment to people who already have clearances\u2014the government agencies themselves. Officials need to know, Dozier says, the likelihood of threats such as a dramatic sea level rise that would leave 500,000 homeless in Bangladesh, even if scientists can&amp;#039;t yet publish some of their findings for the public. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/satellites/a5027/4326977/>