Click on the image for a larger version

(The 26 March 2009 image is from ISIS)

If you haven’t seen it, check out ISIS’s latest report on North Korea’s missile launch preparation which shows an image of the launch site taken on 26 March, 2009. Strangely, ISIS seems to emphasize the crane on top of the gantry. (Something that has been there for years.) I think there are two other, more interesting features to the photograph. First, the gantry seems to have been opened up (note that in the 2003 images the gantry seems slimmer than the current image). This would seem to indicate that the walkways normally associated with gantries have been moved outward to accept the stacking of the different stages. Another interesting feature is the fact that you cannot distinguish the individual floors in the gantry shadow; a feature that is clearly visible in the other two images. Those 2003 images bracket the Sun’s elevation of the current image and since both show the floors, I think we could reasonably expect to see them in the shadow unless North Korea had placed curtains on the gantry to block the view of oblique satellite photographs.

Of course, there are a couple of other possible explanations. First, opening the gantry would change the geometry and might account for the lack of individual floor shadows. That, however, seems less likely to me than the curtain explanation since I would expect an opened gantry to make the individual floors more visible in the shadows. Its also possible that we are actually seeing the shadow of the missile, which in this hypothesis, is not surrounded by gantry. This seems even less likely to me because, then, we should still see the individual floor shadows from the gantry. As I say, I think both of these possibilities are less likely, but I thought I’d mention then.