whether the apparant jagged area on the left wing is due to damage or pixelation at the displayed resolution. From this CNN article:

But in a NASA briefing Friday afternoon, space shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore showed one of the photographs and said that the choppiness seen on the left wing was due to the camera's resolution. He also said that experts had yet to establish if the distortion of Columbia's shape seen in the photographs indicated a fault or was the result of the angle from which the images were taken.



"The nature of the photograph [because of the resolution] shows some choppiness to the wing leading edge. ... It is not clear to me that it reveals anything significant at the moment," he said.



Now, there could be several reasons for the apparent low resolution.

1. The Air Force didn't want to release the full resolution images. This is likely for the public, but NASA has people cleared to see highly classified information. I seriously doubt they'd hide pertinent information in the accident investigation. Those investigators most definitely have a need to know.

2. The system may not work well on objects that close to the camera. I've read that Starfire has a 1 foot resolution on objects 600 miles away. However, the Shuttle was probably a lot closer than that - we'd need to see how close the flight path was to the Starfire site. Some systems designed for distant viewing have trouble focusing on close in objects.

3. Starfire uses adaptive optics for maximum resolution. Since the Shuttle was already in the upper part of the atmosphere, they may not have been able to use the atmospheric compensation because the target was moving so fast.