Maxar Satellite Images Confirm Russian Massacre In Ukraine

Satellite images have revealed what appear to be a mass grave and the bodies of civilians scattered in the streets of the Ukrainian town of Bucha.

Photo Insert: Four of the nine images taken by Maxar on March 18, 19 and 31 appear to show bodies lying on Yablonska Stree.

The images implicate Russian troops in a massacre and destroy the fervent denials of Moscow that the massacre was “fake,” Ben Turner reported for Live Science.

Many of the images were taken during the Russian occupation of Bucha by Maxar Technologies' WorldView-3 satellite and showed the bodies — some of which were discovered by eyewitnesses with their hands bound and with gunshot wounds to the head — could have been in the streets for as long as three weeks.

Another, taken on March 31, shows what is likely a mass grave on church grounds, which includes a trench that is roughly 45 feet (14 meters) long, said Maxar, a satellite company that produces "90% of the foundational geospatial intelligence used by the US Government for national security and keeping troops safe on the ground," as well as the imagery for companies such as Google Earth and Google Maps.

A previous Maxar satellite image, taken on March 10, shows what looks like the initial excavations of the grave.

The connection between Russian troops and the alleged massacre was documented over time thanks to the increasingly powerful satellite imagery available today. Maxar’s WorldView-3 satellite has a color image resolution of 12 inches (31 centimeters).

That means that it can distinguish between patches of dark and light and different colors, enough to pick out individual people, cars, and other small objects. Earlier satellites, such as NASA's Landsat Imagers, have resolution down to 50 feet (15 meters) — enough to pick out environmental features such as lakes, forests, and mountains, but not enough to identify people or small objects in an urban landscape, according to Maxar.

Maxar currently has four satellites in orbit, all of which are in sun synchronous orbits — a particular kind of polar orbit that enables an imaging satellite to orbit from pole to pole in a fixed position relative to the sun as Earth rotates beneath it. This lets the satellite constantly capture longitudinal slices of the parts of the planet where it is daytime.

Maxar’s WorldView-3 operates at an altitude of 383 miles (618 kilometers), and can also return to image the same patch of ground in less than a day. This ability to recapture images of the same places very frequently is what helped the satellites tie the massacre with the town’s occupation by Russian troops.

Of nine images taken on March 18th, 19th and 31st and provided by Maxar to Reuters, four of them appear to show bodies lying on Yablonska Street, a road in the town. Maxar also provided a separate set of images to the New York Times, which, after analyzing the pictures, wrote that it could confirm that the locations of the bodies on the ground were as they had been imaged by the satellite.

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