Originally Posted by
rh200
Is it possible that they are taking images at lower resolution to cover more area in each pass?
The 'high quality' Google images are from aircraft not satellites. If you look at GE images in the outback you will see the resolution of the civil satellite images.
On the question of Ping latency, this is not an ip type network ping (which can have lots of reasons for latency), but appears to be a clock synchronisation ping to get the right time division for the TDM to work. As such it will be implemented in hardware not software, so it is unlikely there is anything to influence that latency. It is also likely to be only a rough time synch (say 10 to 100 Microseconds - which would be a 6 to 60 mile precision - so altitude changes would not meaningfully change the time delay.