WESTMINSTER, Colo. — Scripps News Denver is getting a look at the aftermath of the United States' airstrike on Iran thanks to satellite imagery from a Westminster-based company.
MAXAR Technologies operates 10 satellites in orbit. The satellites captured images of Iran's nuclear sites, which were targeted in the attack.
David Goldfischer, an associate professor at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of International Studies, said one of the big questions left to be answered is what exactly was destroyed.
"The level of destruction and whether Iran succeeded in escaping with that uranium are now big question marks that hang over the significance of that outcome and the even more unknowable question of whether Iran is going to now, in a kind of desperate moment for that regime move, as covertly as they can and as quickly as they can to try to reconstitute their ability to get the bomb," he said.
Godfischer said the "after" images of the airstrike do tell a fraction of the story.
"The ash simply seems to indicate that concrete was struck," he said. "So, the ceilings of this gigantic underground facility are going to be highly reinforced concrete. Iran has worked for years on ways of strengthening concrete, so the fact that there's concrete dust doesn't necessarily prove that it penetrated through the concrete to the open areas beneath where this incredibly complex weapon is able to time its explosion after it burrows."
"The idea was to get through all that concrete, then explode and just destroy all the centrifuges again," Goldfischer added. "It's pure speculation."
The satellite imagery provided by MAXAR does show a blue-gray coloring in some of the "after" photos, as well as what look to be craters in others. Goldfischer told Denver7 the technology gives the world a quick look at what happened.
"It's extremely impressive, from a technological point of view, to see these pinpoint craters," he said. "So, the accuracy was there. What's unknown is whether the depth of the strike was sufficient to actually destroy the centrifuges."
The big question is what comes next.
"No one knows what will happen in the next 48 hours," he said. "If you want to be an optimist, one could imagine people in the Trump administration trying to seek avenues for dialogue with the regime, in a search to resume negotiations that are not resembling the past negotiations, which essentially appear to be a stalling tactic by Iran."
President Donald Trump announced that Israel and Iran had agreed to a “complete and total ceasefire" soon after Iran launched a limited missile attack Monday on a U.S. military base in Qatar, retaliating for the American bombing of its nuclear sites.
