|
I COULD TELL YOU BUT THEN YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE DESTROYED BY ME -- EMBLEMS FROM THE PENTAGON'S BLACK WORLD |
|
MISSION OPERATIONS —YOU CAN RUN ... Another patch associated with Operating Division 4 of the National Reconnaissance Office. The background pattern of stars seems to represent the night sky, with the single white star signifying a reconnaissance satellite. Three orbits are depicted around the Earth, all of which are associated with different reconnaissance tasks. The horizontal orbit around the Earth represents a geostationary orbit for communications and (in the case of the NRO) signals intelligence collection (SIGINT). The Rhyolite/Aquacade series of satellites, for example, were kept in a geostationary orbit over Indochina to constantly monitor Soviet and Chinese communications during the Cold War. The downlink for the Rhyolite satellites was located in the Australian outback at Pine Gap, where the collected signals were encrypted, then sent to the NSA at Fort Meade via another geosynchronous satellite. The highly elliptical ring depicted on the patch represents a Molniya orbit, which allows a reconnaissance satellite to spend most of its time over one particular region of the Earth and is often used by SIGINT satellites. The third ring represents a polar orbit, an orbit often associated with imaging and photography because a satellite will cover much larger swaths of the Earth's surface than satellites in other orbits.
|
