CORONA, along with the related ARGON and LANYARD systems, were the world's first military intelligence satellites, in operation from 1960–1972. Following their declassification in 1995, the National Archives and Records Administration assumed curation of original films and mission-related documents, while the United States Geological Survey (USGS) was charged with distribution of the imagery. The USGS provides a good discussion of CORONA history, data characteristics and mission summaries. Several general works on the history of the CORONA missions are available as well, in particular Day, Logsdon and Latell's (1998), Eye in the Sky: The Story of the CORONA Spy Satellites, and McDonald's (1997) edited volume, Corona Between the Sun and the Earth: The First NRO Reconnaissance Eye in Space (also see McDonald (1995) and Ruffner (1995).
CORONA and related missions were given 'Keyhole' (KH) designations by the intelligence community, describing the various camera systems employed by the program over its history. The earliest CORONA missions (KH-1, KH-2, KH-3 and KH-4), in operation from 1960-1963, provided moderate resolution images (7.62–12.19m), and only the KH-4 offered stereo imagery. The ARGON satellites (KH-5) were designed for larger, mapping purposes and have rather coarse resolution of around 140m. The experimental LANYARD system offered significantly better resolution (1.83m) in a single frame camera, but only one satellite was launched in 1963. For archaeological applications, the two latest generations of CORONA, KH-4A and KH-4B, are generally the best as they offer high resolution, 2.74m and 1.83m at nadir respectively. These missions also offer stereo imagery and regional-scale coverage over much of the globe, with dozens of satellites launched from 1963–1972 collecting more than 700,000 images. A roughly contemporary system, the KH-7, collected a much smaller number of images from 1963-1967, primarily over specific areas of interest, but can offer even better spatial resolution than KH-4B satellites at up to 0.61m. The KH-7 images, along with lower resolution mapping images collected by the KH-9 satellites, were declassified more recently in 2002. A new round of declassifications of successor satellite missions, the GAMBIT (KH-8) and HEXAGON (KH-9), was announced in September 2011 (National Reconnaissance Office 2011). These images, when they become available to the public, will offer very high spatial resolution stereo coverage (better than 0.61m, although full resolution of the images has not yet been revealed) from the 1970s and early 1980s (McDonald and Widlake 2012).
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