Is there an online catalog for declassified Soviet Union Spy Satellite images (Zenit-4, Resurs-F1, Okean)?
As others have shown interest for this question I'll answer it using the information I've been able to gather so far:
There might be more than one archive or old Soviet Union imagery. As there were both military and civil missions (in contrast, film-recovery mission were forbidden in the US for non-military proposes).
The archive I know of so far is handled by the "Federal scientific and technological center of geodesy, cartography and infrastructure of spatial data" and contain more than 439,000 frames covering the whole world between 1974 and 1999.
From the many e-mails and contact messages, I've only received answers from INNOTER. They have been very helpful and provided me with shape files of the whole archive. The frames have not been digitized yet but the metadata is well kept, with footprint polygons for each frame, date, time, solar elevation and even percentage of cloud cover.
I've created the following figure showing the whole coverage of the archive.
The images have been taken with three camera models: KATE-200 (in green and from 1974 to 1999), KFA-1000 (in magenta and from 1974 to 1999), and MK-4 (in yellow and from 1988 to 1995), here are some specifications for each camera:
Multizonal and spectrazonal are different kinds of film that can be used by the MK-4 camera.
I'll update in the future with more details about the digitization process, that doesn't seem to be well established.
Any help in locating the archives derived from the many missions launched on the 60's would be highly appreciated.
I'm afraid, but there is only little chance, that such images will be in wide access. Most part of such images is still on film source, not in digital. Maybe there are resources, forums, trackers etc., where You can find portions of these images. But I think, most of them will cover territory of ex-S.U. The biggest glacial image archive is property of Russian Geography Society. How to make order from that arcgive - IDK.
I would suggest contacting the Russian embassy in the country that you live or work in, (N.B. If you work in a government or government funded job seek permission first).
Explain what you are looking for and why and you will almost certainly find them very helpful in:
- Pointing you towards any online resorces
- Possibly assisting with translation
- Putting you in touch with Russian researchers who are working in the same area and speak English
- Possibly providing access to film images or prioritising digitising them
- Possibly even assisting in trying to get more recent images from the same area declassified sooner than would otherwise be possibly or allowing you limited access to still classified images for this express purpose.