they fly at 4 miles a second in a polar orbit snapping huge swaths of pictures at a time. >> how would they have taken these images and determined it was debris? >> they're looking for bright objects against a dark sea. sometimes you use change detection software to do that. other times they have human eyeballs. in the case of the australians, they had lots and lots of eye balls. >> reporter: google earth can zoom in and capture these photos. but these satellite pictures of the objects in question are fuzzy. brown says australian intelligence officials likely saw higher resolution versions than the ones released to the public. >> that's because they don't want to share that information with potential adversaries, for example. >> reporter: why did it take four days for the pictures to go public? brown says digital globe would have had to download them to ground stations then send them via satellite to their colorado labs, process them in different formats, then send them to the