A Spy Agency's Challenge: How To Sort A Million Photos A Day

"When the U.S. government took its first satellite photos in 1960, it wasn't easy getting those pictures back to Earth."

"After the satellite took the pictures, the film was dropped from space in a capsule attached to a parachute. A military plane with a large hook flew by to collect the capsule in midair over the Pacific Ocean."

"'They called the pilots who flew these missions 'star catchers,' because they were catching what looked like stars falling from the sky,' said Katie Donegan, with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA."

"She says all this effort might yield a few grainy, black-and-white shots of a Soviet military site."

"Fast-forward to 2011. The NGA scored a major coup by locating Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan. The NGA not only took detailed photographs at that time, but it even "went back in time" to look at earlier satellite imagery. This showed the compound under construction, before the roof was put on, and revealed the doorways, the staircases and bedrooms inside the house."