http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/10/maps-soviet-union-ussr-military-secret-mapping-spies/
OK, who's been moonlighting for the ruskies?
lanceboyle93101, post: 451129, member: 2061 wrote: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/10/maps-soviet-union-ussr-military-secret-mapping-spies/
OK, who's been moonlighting for the ruskies?
Very interesting. I also read that the first aerial photography of Area 51 that was publically available here in the US was actually purchased from Soviet bloc sources since the US gov't. officially denied its existence and was not available on any aerials at the time.
Years ago, at an IMTA (International Map Trade Association) meeting, I went on an 'all access tour' of EastView Geospatial ( http://geospatial.com/ ) and it was an eye opener. (Remember that this assessment is coming from someone with around a quarter million maps in their personal collection.)
The take-away was how much money Russia must have spent to make 1:50,000 scale maps of the entire USA and the rest of the world. EV had them shelved and available for scanning/sale. It was a mapping effort that made the USGS collection look lame. Each map had a detailed description of all of the targets and industry on the back in cyrillic too. If I remember correctly, the largest purchaser of these Russian maps were US 3-letter agencies.
There were many great stories about how these maps came to be in Minnesota, I can't judge if they were true or not. Probably best to not repeat them here 🙂
Mark Silver, post: 451133, member: 1087 wrote: ..There were many great stories about how these maps came to be in Minnesota, I can't judge if they were true or not. Probably best to not repeat them here 🙂
In the late seventies I worked with a telecommunications outfit that did engineering for the DoD. Some of the hardware and locations were "dark" and required security clearances and subsequent debriefs, including turning back in all the maps, etc. that had been provided to us. It was always a scramble at the end of a job (sometimes over a year) to figure out where all the issued hardcopies were at.
Some of our work was located in the waters between the US and USSR (I was never on premise) where cold war surveillance was prolific. A number of years later I found out some of the remote (decommissioned) equipment wound up at a surplus sale in Croatia.
Someone had a lot of explaining to deal with....
EastView Cartographic made a lot of money from my clients. Russian military topo maps were very expensive, but often the only source to geo-rectify satellite imagery. I found an old readme file for a Landsat image I geo-rectified using Russian military maps in 1997 in Uzbekistan (Landsat Path/Row P157R31). Here are the mapping parameters.
Geo-rectified using Russian Military maps
[INDENT]Projection parameters for Russian military maps
[INDENT] Projection = Gauss-Kruger
Datum = Pulkovo, 1942 (alternate spelling Pulkova)
Ellipsoid = Krasovsky, 1940 (alternate spelling Krasovski)
Central Meridian Scale Factor = 1.0
Zone = 11
Central Meridian = 63 00 00 E
False Easting = 11,500,000.0
Base Latitude = 0 00 00 N
False Northing = 0.0
Units of Measurement = meters
Scale = 1:200,000[/INDENT][/INDENT]
The zones are similar to UTM, with the exceptions that Zone 1 begins at the Greenwich Meridian, the scale factor is 1.0 and the false easting is the zone number times 1,000,000 plus 500,000 (Gauss Kruger projection is the same as Transverse Mercator). Whenever I was unable to find topographic maps produced by the country containing the imagery, there was always the Russian military topo maps as a last, expensive alternative. I even learned a wee bit of the cyrillic alphabet and Russian mapping terms.
Edit to add: I found them to be quite accurate for rectifying imagery (or should I say they were precise based on the mapped features being internally consistent).
Gene Kooper, post: 451140, member: 9850 wrote: I found them to be quite accurate for rectifying imagery (or should I say they were precise based on the mapped features being internally consistent).
Makes me wonder how they setup ground control.
I'm not sure why anyone here would be surprised that the USSR was mapping the world. Early in my career I worked for a small defense intelligence agency. Our in-house motto was we map the world. We did, in great detail. Hell, we even mapped the oceans. We even had a survey group, which for some reason I passed on for the 25% pay bump to live in DC. I'd tell you how we did it but then I'd have to kill you.
