Important Takeaways:

• Scientists in Beijing have created ‘the world’s most powerful spy camera’ which can pick out facial details from distances exceeding 63 miles (100km).
• It means the spy camera could potentially be in space aboard a floating satellite while clearly seeing faces of people on Earth’s surface.
• It could also take high-resolution images of foreign military satellites operated by other nations that are also orbiting Earth, the South China Morning Post reported.
• The technology, detailed by the scientists in a new paper, could be launched aboard a satellite in the near future.
• Robert Morton, author and member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), called it a ‘massive security concern’.
• ‘Millimeter resolution from 60+ miles up? That’s next-level surveillance,’ he said in a post on X (Twitter).
• The spy camera has been newly developed by China’s Academy of Sciences’ Aerospace Information Research Institute in Beijing.
• It uses a system called synthetic aperture lidar (SAL), a remote sensing technology that sends out a pulse of light energy and then records the amount of that energy reflected back.
• Capable of operating day and night, SAL creates 2D and 3D reconstructions of surfaces of the Earth in various weather conditions.
• Because it relies on optical waves, it’s capable of creating imagery with much finer resolution and better detail – described as a ‘quantum leap’.
• The experts conducted a successful test across Qinghai Lake in China’s northwest, with the SAL device on one side and the target 63.2 miles (101.8km) away.

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