I've got a hobby-interest in remote sensing (satellite imagery). Over the past couple of days, I've been playing around with data from the ESA's Sentinel-1 mission. The ESA (being cool and European Union-y) makes most of the data from Sentinel series of satellites freely accessible to the public, and provides some decent software for processing and analysing the data.
Sentinel-1 is a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite. I don't fully understand the physics behind SAR, but it's basically an active radar measurement of the ground track the satellite passes over. Different surfaces give different sorts of radar returns (measured as a change in polarisation), and so SAR can be used to classify different terrains (crops, forests, grasslands, rock, etc), like in the false-colour image of Flevoland I've attached. Resolution is moderate: for Sentinel-1, each pixel ends up being about 4x4 m on the ground.
@spinflip could chalk it up to the fact that america is not alot but defiantly technologically ahead of russia and the majority of the world ( give or take a few choice contries). id wager to say that because of when it was the ussr they didn't advance well compared to everyone else so when they became whatever version of democracy they are now they're playing catch up.
@Tsunachi well, I'd say it's probably non-trivial to put a nuclear reactor-driven high power radar setup into space. SAR seems to do the same job more efficiently, so I'd be interested to know why RORSAT didn't use a similar setup. I assume it was impossible at the time, but why is that so?