Sorry folks for interrupting again with another (quick) question - unrelated to the telecommunication satellites debate.
Here is a quite beautiful aerial picture of the famous Mont Saint-Michel in northwest France. I found it on this page of the European Space Agency (ESA) website.
At first glance, and judging by the apparent elevation angle, I'd say this was snapped from some airplane - or perhaps a balloon.
But no: ESA claims that this photo was snapped by one of the two Pléiades satellites - both allegedly orbiting at an altitude of 694km (approximately twice as high up as the purported orbit of the ISS). Just for comparison, here we have...
MONT SAINT-MICHEL seen from ground level________MONT SAINT-MICHEL seen from "694km of altitude" (?)
...and the Moon surface - seen from "22km of altitude" (according to NASA)- more than 30X closer!!
Does all this add up to you? If not, just who do you think is taking us for a ride here? ESA? NASA? Both?"NASA Releases Closer Looks at Apollo Landing Sites from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter"
http://www.universetoday.com/88692/nasa ... e-orbiter/
This is the third resolution of Apollo sites that the LRO team has released — the first came from LRO’s commissioning phase where the altitude was about 100 km and the resolution was about 1 meter per pixel; next came the release of images from an altitude of about 50 km, with a resolution of about 50 cm per pixel; and now from about 21-22 km altitude with a resolution of 25 cm per pixel.
“These are the sharpest images of Apollo landing sites we’ll probably ever get with LRO,” said Rich Vondrak, LRO project scientist, “as we’ll never go as low in altitude as we were in the past month.”