PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
January 2016
7
T
he
C
orona
P
rogram
: S
cope
, I
magery
,
and
P
eople
Starting in 1960, over 860,000 satellite image strips
were made by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the US
Air Force, using the Keyhole KH 1-KH-4B (Corona,
2015) series of satellites with 102 flights returning
usable data. 35 million square kilometers were covered.
The images were declassified in 1995 and later made
available to the general public from the EROS Data
Center archive of the US Geological Survey (USGS) via
the Internet.
Since 1995, hundreds of books, articles and scientific
papers about the Corona program have been published.
However, only a very few gave technical details of the
initial application of Corona to reconnaissance. Technical
Details of precise mapping of missile sites and other places
of military significance soon followed. Then, complete map
coverage of the Soviet Union and adjacent countries as
well as the Middle East was published (Galiatsatos, 2004).
A useful overview of the satellite installation and cameras
is given by Auelmann (2012).
A model of a dual camera version of the installation is
shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. The camera and film compartment of the last in the Corona series.
National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC.
“...hundreds of books, articles
and scientific papers about the
Corona program have been
published. However, only a
very few gave technical details
of the initial application of
Corona to reconnaissance.”
CORONA
:
M
apping
from
G
eometric
D
istortion
in
KH4 I
mages
By Irwin Scollar, Nikolaos Galiatsatos, Clifford Mugnier
Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing
Vol. 82, No. 1, January 2016, pp. 7–13.
0099-1112/16/7–13
© 2015 American Society for Photogrammetry
and Remote Sensing
doi: 10.14358/PERS.83.1.7
