These each came equipped with a heat shield which would be dropped after the film bucket reached 60,000 feet, at which point a parachute would be deployed. The solution was to jettison the two re-entry capsules for each camera (appropriately known as the " film buckets"). This rescue maneuver didn't always work out as planned.
#IMAGE BUCKET CORONA HOW TO#
The problem, of course, was how to recover the precious photographic intelligence (mostly of Chinese and Soviet projects) that was on board these satellites after they had used up all their film. Initially, these cameras were only able to resolve images on the ground down to a diameter of 40 feet from an orbit of 100 miles up (the same as the International Space Station), but later generations of Corona satellites reduced this to objects just 5 feet in diameter-which is nearly on par with satellites used today. In short, the photographic equipment on-board the Corona satellites was nothing to bat an eye at. The entire cameras were initially about 5 feet long, but this size was later increased to 9 feet. These cameras were mid-range telephoto (610mm focal-length) with a 7-inch triplet lens (a lens that is actually a composite of three lenses to correct for distortion).
The cameras used were specially designed by the defense contractor Itek, which specialized in reconnaissance systems. The first satellites would take photos constantly, but later versions could be manipulated by radio to go to sleep and resume taking pictures at a later date. Early Corona satellites carried about a mile and a half of film for each of the two cameras on board, but by the fifth generation of satellites this had doubled to about 3 miles of film per camera. They used special 70mm film made by Kodak (for the sake of comparison, civilian cameras typically use 35mm film) which allowed for wide and high resolution shots. Beginning with Discoverer 14, each Corona program satellite carried increasingly sophisticated camera equipment on-board.
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