Intelligence officials and a top secret U.S. military strike team called upon a fleet of navigation, communications and imaging satellites in the Sunday raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, to which the president and other officials had a front row seat thanks to live video beamed from satellite to satellite.The Air Force’s network of secure, jam-resistant Milstar satellites are designed to provide the president, secretary of defense and U.S. military assured communications. The satellites route communications onboard without the need for land-based relay stations, making messages less likely to be intercepted, according to an Air Force fact sheet. Covering every segment of the globe except for polar regions, the satellites can transmit up to 1.54 megabits per second of data over 32 channels. The five Milstar satellites receive transmissions from small user terminals such as cameras and radios carried by the Navy assault team that descended on bin Laden’s compound. The Navy operates its own UHF communications satellites for mobile users, but their bandwidth capability falls short of the capacity of the Air Force Milstar network. Intelligence officials could have also called upon NRO’s own communications satellites, Air Force weather observatories, civilian spacecraft and international platforms in the days and hours before the attack. Read more in Spaceflight Now.PHOTO: A DigitalGlobe imaging satellite collected this view of the bin Laden compound Jan. 15, 2011. Credit: DigitalGlobe
Satellites Made Osama bin Laden Raid Possible
