Iran Tweets Trump Right Back Over Satellite

Iran countered President Trump's tweet of an image showing a "catastrophic accident" at a satellite launch site by tweeting a photo that seems to have the Nahid 1 in one piece. "Good morning Donald Trump!" the tweet, posted Saturday by Iran's IT minister, said in English, the New York Post reports. Trump had posted the aerial view of the site where the satellite was being built after an apparent explosion. Iran conceded there was an accident after photos taken by commercial satellites showed smoke rising from the space center in northern Iran, per NPR.

The image tweeted Friday by Trump seems to have been taken by a classified satellite or drone, experts said. The wisdom of releasing the image up for debate. "We had a photo and I released it, which I have the absolute right to do," Trump said later. The high resolution made one expert think the photo was taken by a drone or spy plane, which would mean the US violated Iranian airspace. It could have been a photo of a photo, or a photo of a computer screen. No matter the source, releasing the photo could telegraph to other nations that the US has capabilities they didn't know about. "You really risk giving away the way you know things," one expert said. "That allows people to adapt and hide how they carry out illicit activity." (More Iran stories.)