North Korea claimed that its leader Kim Jong-un examined “detailed photographs” taken by his first spy satellite of the White House and other countries’ military bases.
But North Korea has yet to release any images, leaving analysts and foreign governments debating how capable the new satellite actually is.
Although the existence or authenticity of these images has not been verified by independent organizations, experts have doubts about the usefulness of such images taken by the Malligyong-1 spy satellite launched last week.
The images were taken by satellite on Monday, according to the state-run KCNA news agency. Mr Kim, who oversaw the launch with his daughter, is said to have reviewed them on Tuesday.
Images identified as “major target areas” included images of the White House, the Pentagon, a US shipyard and four nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and a British aircraft carrier at air bases in Norfolk and Newport. KCNA.
North Korea claimed that the satellite also sent back images of military bases in South Korea, the US Pacific territory of Guam and the state of Hawaii.
Mr. Kim expressed “great satisfaction with the successful preparations for the operation of the reconnaissance satellite ‘Malligyong-1’ before its official launch.”
Pyongyang’s detonation of the spy satellite on November 21 drew immediate condemnation from its neighbors and the United States, including the UN, for violating sanctions. North Korean satellites are subject to UN sanctions because they contain banned technology used in the regime’s ballistic missile program.
The Pentagon said North Korea’s satellite had entered orbit but did not comment on Pyongyang’s claims about the images it captured.
“I will say that there are a lot of images of the Pentagon and the White House on the Internet,” Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Patrick Ryder told reporters.
South Korea confirmed that the satellite had successfully entered orbit, but could not verify its capabilities to receive and send images from space.
The satellite could be capable of seeing large areas or warships, and even a medium-resolution camera could offer Pyongyang that ability, said Dave Schmerler, a satellite imaging expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS).
“But how useful these images will be depends on what they want to use them for,” he said.
For medium-resolution satellites to be useful in a conflict, Mr. Schmerler said, North Korea would need to launch many more of them to allow more frequent passage over key areas, a goal the Northern Space Agency is also pursuing.
“It’s a big step for them to go from scratch to something, but we’re speculating about use cases until we see the footage they’ve collected,” he said.
Jeffrey Lewis, another researcher at CNS, said images in which Mr. Kim examined satellite images with his daughter suggested they might be panchromatic, a type of black-and-white photography sensitive to all wavelengths of visible light.
Following the launch, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Reuters that two new objects in the orbital plane had been cataloged in US Space Force data.
This was consistent with a launch from North Korea on the date Pyongyang stated. “I concluded that the objects were a spy satellite and the upper stage of the rocket,” he said.
However, it has not yet been confirmed whether the Malligyong-1 reconnaissance satellite with payload capacity is operational.
“To evaluate the success of this launch, it is crucial not only to determine whether the projectile entered orbit, but also to secure the ability to reconnoitre and adjust from that orbit,” said Hong Min, a senior researcher at the Korea National Institute. Merger.
“This includes verifying the ability to take images with optical cameras and transmitting them to the satellite center as appropriate.”
If the satellite had low resolution, it would not be able to provide North Korea with detailed intelligence on specific weapons systems, experts said.
But it would still be useful for identifying things like large troop movements.
Additional reporting by agencies