commercial satellite photos are helping define modern warfare.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Novosafo.

Over the last several days, you may have seen the latest examples of a growing phenomenon,

satellite images of a conflict zone.

This time, they were of Iranian nuclear sites, before and after American bombs struck.

The images come from commercial satellite companies,

a change from our past reliance on government-provided photographs.

That change gained steam with Russia's war in Ukraine, according to Mariel Borowitz.

She's an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and specializes in space policy

and the satellite industry.

With the Ukraine war, we saw a situation where Russia has many of these types of reconnaissance satellites, high-resolution imagery satellites.

And Ukraine really just had a handful of satellites, and they were able to leverage the commercial remote sensing sector to arguably have even better capabilities than Russia and to really have that

imagery to monitor what was happening and have that level of awareness.

And how were the capabilities potentially better than what Russia has?

So just the number of companies that exist in the U.S. and Europe that are offering different types of

capabilities. So, for example, we've had for a long time satellite companies that offer

what they call high resolution imagery. So you can see things very precisely on the ground

down to, you know, six inches to a foot. So really, really great for seeing lots of detail,

understanding if there are movements of troops, looking at potential targeting or determining

how much damage has occurred. But we also have commercial satellites now that are operating

large constellations of satellites. and that means you can revisit

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