SEOUL, Nov 28 (Portal) – After decades of satellite surveillance by foreign governments and analysts, North Korea has sent its first spy satellite into global orbit, with a message to the world: We can watch you too.
On Tuesday, North Korean state media said leader Kim Jong Un reviewed spy satellite photos of the White House, the Pentagon and U.S. aircraft carriers at the Norfolk Naval Base.
North Korea successfully launched its first reconnaissance satellite last week, which it said will monitor the military movements of the United States and South Korea.
Since then, state media has reported on satellite-photographed cities and military bases in South Korea, Guam and Italy, as well as in the US capital.
“Do you remember when you got the toy you’ve always wanted for Christmas and you were so excited you wanted to tell everyone about it?” Chad O’Carroll, founder of the North Korea-focused website NK News, said in a post on X about the KCNA reports.
So far, Pyongyang has not released any images, leaving analysts and foreign governments to debate how powerful the new satellite actually is.
South Korea, which announced Tuesday that the Nov. 30 launch date for its first homegrown spy satellite on a U.S. Falcon 9 rocket would be delayed due to weather, said the North’s satellite capabilities cannot be verified.
There is no reason to doubt that the satellite can see the large areas or warships claimed by North Korea, since even a medium-resolution camera can provide Pyongyang with that capability, said Dave Schmerler, a satellite imagery expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS).
North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un meets with members of the temporary committee for satellite launch preparation, in this picture released by the Korea Central News Agency on November 24, 2023. KCNA acquires licensing rights through Portal
“But how useful these images are depends on what you want to use them for,” he said.
For medium-resolution satellites to be useful in a conflict, North Korea will need to launch many more satellites to allow more frequent overflights of key sites, Schmerler said, a goal the North Korean space agency says it is pursuing.
“It’s a big jump for them to go from nothing to something, but until we can see the images they collect, we’re speculating about their use cases,” he said.
Jeffrey Lewis, another researcher at the CNS, said a state media photo of Kim examining the satellite images with his daughter suggests they may be panchromatic images, a type of black-and-white photography that covers all wavelengths of the visible is sensitive to light.
North Korea released panchromatic images of downtown Seoul after a missile launch in December 2022. This was supposedly a test of satellite control, image capture and data downlink for its future military reconnaissance satellite.
Tuesday’s photos were the latest in a series of images of what KCNA described as “key target areas.”
Kim also inspected satellite photos of Andersen Air Force Base in the US Western Pacific territory of Guam and a US shipyard and air base in Norfolk and Newport, where four nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and a British aircraft carrier were spotted, KCNA said.
Commercial images of these cities were not immediately available on November 27, the day North Korea said it took its photos.
The United States and South Korea have condemned the satellite launch as a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions banning any use of ballistic technology.
Reporting by Hyonhee Shin. Editing by Chris Reese, Sandra Maler and Gerry Doyle
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