Quill (satellite)
| Manufacturer | Goodyear University of Michigan's Willow Run Laboratories Lockheed (Agena) |
|---|---|
| Country of origin | USA |
| Operator | US National Reconnaissance Office |
| Applications | Radar imaging |
| Specifications | |
| Bus | Agena-D |
| Launch mass | 1,500 kg |
| Regime | Low Earth |
| Design life | 4 days |
| Production | |
| Status | Out of service |
| Built | 3 |
| Launched | 1 |
| Retired | 1 |
| Maiden launch | OPS 3762, 21 December 1964 |
| Last retirement | OPS 3762, 25 December 1964 |
| Related spacecraft | |
| Derived from | KH-4 |
Quill was an experimental United States National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) program of the 1960s, which provided the first images of Earth from space using a synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Radar-imaging spacecraft of this design were not intended to be deployed operationally, since it was known that this system's resolution, inferior to that of concurrent experimental airborne systems, would not serve that purpose. Instead, the program's predominant goal was to show whether the propagation of radar waves through a large volume of the atmosphere and ionosphere would dangerously degrade the performance of the synthetic aperture feature.
A detailed description of the program has been made available on-line by NRO.