The Corona Program

Date: June 1959

Corona was a program that involved various reconnaissance satellites. These satellites were used to spy over the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, and other areas.

These satellites were mainly watching over the Soviets to see where they were constructing their ballistic missiles and how they were getting to them. Even though they were also involved in this Space Race, the USSR was not to be trusted, as it could be easily making missiles meant to harm the U.S. and other countries.

“The first launches of the Corona program were announced by the USAF as satellites in the Discoverer series. This Discoverer program, then described as a satellite technology development effort, was in reality mainly a cover for the Corona photographic missions” (NASA,gov)

  “The satellites used film canisters that were returned to earth in capsules for evaluation. These capsules were designed to be recovered by a special aircraft during parachute descent, but were also designed to float to permit recovery from the ocean. All film was black-and-white, with the exception of some small samples of infrared and color film carried on some missions as experiments” (NASA.gov).

In the Corona program, the first satellite was dubbed KH-1, and future versions would go to the next number. The KH stands for keyhole, and the numbers stand for the type of cameras the satellites used.                                                                                                                                                                       In 1995, President Clinton signed an Executive Order directing the declassification of intelligence imagery acquired by the Corona, Argon, and Lanyard missions. The order provides for the declassification of more than 860,000 images of the Earth's surface, collected between 1960 and 1972.” (NASA.gov)