For decades, privacy experts have been wary of snooping from space. They feared satellites powerful enough to zoom in on individuals, capturing close-ups that might differentiate adults from children or suited sunbathers from those in a state of nature.

Now, quite suddenly, analysts say, a startup is building a new class of satellite whose cameras would, for the first time, do just that.

“We’re acutely aware of the privacy implications,” Topher Haddad, head of Albedo Space, the company making the new satellites, said in an interview. His company’s technology will image people but not be able to identify them, he said. Albedo, Mr. Haddad added, was nonetheless taking administrative steps to address a wide range of privacy concerns.

Anyone living in the modern world has grown familiar with diminishing privacy amid a surge security cameras, trackers built into smartphones, facial recognition systems, drones and other forms of digital monitoring. But what makes the overhead surveillance potentially scary, experts say, is its ability to invade areas once seen as intrinsically off limits.

“This is a giant camera in the sky for any government to use at any time without our knowledge,” said Jennifer Lynch, general counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who in 2019 urged civil satellite regulators to address this issue. “We should definitely be worried.”

Against that concern, Mr. Haddad and other supporters of Albedo’s technology say real benefits must be weighed, especially when it comes to fighting disasters and saving lives.

“You’ll know which house is on fire and where the people are fleeing,” said D. James Baker, a former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which licenses the nation’s civilian imaging satellites.

Based in the Denver area, Albedo Space has 50 employees and has raised roughly $100 million. It plans to launch its first satellite in early 2025, Mr. Haddad said. Ultimately, he foresees a fleet of 24 spacecraft.

Investors in Albedo include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the investment firm of Bill Gates. Albedo’s strategic advisory board includes former directors of the C.I.A. and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, an arm of the Pentagon.

The company’s website makes no mention of imaging people, or the privacy issues. Even so, reconnaissance experts say regulators should wake up before its spacecraft start taking their first close-ups.

“It’s a big deal,” said Linda Zall, a former C.I.A. official whose decades-long career involved some of the nation’s most powerful spy satellites. The capabilities will hit home, she predicted, when people realize that things they’re trying to hide in their backyards can now be observed with new clarity. “Privacy is a real issue,” Dr. Zall said.

“It’s taking us one step closer to a Big-Brother-is-watching kind of world,” added Jonathan C. McDowell, a Harvard astrophysicist who publishes a monthly report on civilian and military space developments.

While spacecraft in orbit have long studied the planet, the potential for civilian life to be surveilled by satellites was driven home by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Moscow had denied any serious trouble. But a nonmilitary American satellite took a picture on April 29, 1986, showing that the reactor’s core had ruptured in a fiery breach that was spewing deadly radioactive debris into the atmosphere.

The American news media released the image. It confirmed a disaster, helped start the field of satellite journalism and — almost immediately — stoked fears of snooping from space.

“The quality of the pictures is expected to improve rapidly,” Privacy Journal, a monthly newsletter published in Washington, warned shortly after the atomic disaster. Television news directors, it said, were now seeking to gain unfettered access to space images that could ultimately track everything from troop movements to backyard Jacuzzis.

The visual power of a space camera is usually expressed as the length, in meters, of the smallest feature it can resolve. The figure for early cameras was meters. Now it’s centimeters. Overall, experts say, that improvement makes the new images hundreds of times more detailed and revealing.

The satellite that imaged Chernobyl in 1986 was known as Landsat. NASA built it to monitor crops, forests and other resources on the ground. The craft’s orbit was roughly 400 miles up, and its camera could make out ground objects as small as 30 meters. In contrast, the Chernobyl complex was nearly a kilometer in length. So analysts could easily see it and the exploded reactor.

After the Cold War, in 1994, the Clinton administration approved the commercial use of American spy technology. By 1999, Space Imaging, a subsidiary of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, launched its first satellite. It had a resolving power of one meter. The New York Times displayed the satellite’s first image atop its front page. The Washington Monument stood out clearly, its shadow long in the morning light.

As predicted, pictures from orbit have continually improved in quality, aiding news reporting on wars, refugees, secret bases, human rights abuses, environmental destruction, natural disasters and military buildups.

In 2016, The Associated Press won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering labor abuses in the seafood industry that amounted to slavery. Its journalists used satellite images to track industry ships. Many news organizations, including The Times, now employ specialists skilled in the analysis of satellite imagery.

Mark Brender, a satellite journalism pioneer, noted that reporters on the ground can be harassed and blocked. “But cameras in space are safe from those kinds of pressures,” he said. “They’ve become as indispensable to a free society as a hand-held camera or a printing press.”

Today, the most powerful civilian imaging satellites can differentiate objects on the ground as small as 30 centimeters, or about a foot in diameter. The images let analysts discern road markings and even aircraft tail numbers.

Albedo aims to leap ahead by imaging objects as small as 10 centimeters, or four inches. That became possible because the Trump administration in 2018 took steps to relax the regulations that govern civil satellite resolution. “Soon,” Technology Review, an M.I.T. magazine, warned in 2019, “satellites will be able to watch you everywhere all the time.”

What inspired Albedo’s sharp clarity goals, Mr. Haddad said, was Mr. Trump’s sharing an American spy image from his Twitter account that showed a heavily damaged launchpad in Iran. The image’s resolution was judged to be roughly 10 centimeters, and that led to wide discussion of the commercial possibilities.

Mr. Haddad grew up in Houston and studied engineering at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Texas. He then worked for Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale, Calif. — which has long built spy satellites. Some can rival or exceed a school bus in size and typically cost billions of dollars.

Mr. Haddad founded Albedo with Winston Tri, a former Facebook software engineer, and AyJay Lasater, a former Lockheed Martin satellite engineer. They saw a commercial market for 10-centimeter imagery, but not if the costs were astronomical. Their solution was to place satellites in very low orbits that were comparatively close to their earthly subjects. That would let the satellite fleet use smaller cameras and telescopes, slashing costs.

Landsat was orbiting more than 400 miles up when it imaged Chernobyl. In contrast, Albedo’s founders planned orbits as low as 100 miles At low elevations, spacecraft cut through the planet’s thin outer atmosphere, which can slow them down and shorten their orbital life. The Albedo craft, slightly larger than a full-size refrigerator, will use booster jets to counteract the atmospheric drag.

To charge batteries, satellites often have large arrays of solar panels that spread out like wings. Not Albedo. To reduce the drag, the founders planned a cylindrical spacecraft covered with solar cells.

Albedo was founded in 2020, and Mr. Haddad was confronted with privacy concerns at the outset. Addressing them in a discussion on an online tech forum, he wrote, “We realize we have to properly address privacy and misuse prevention.”

To lower the risks, Mr. Haddad added, the company would approve new customers on a case-by-case basis, develop ways to identify bad actors and make sure its contract terms and conditions spelled out punitive measures for violations of company policy.

In December 2021, Albedo won regulatory approval to loft an imaging satellite with 10-centimeter resolution. Its technology quickly caught the attention of the military and the nation’s intelligence agencies.

In 2022, Albedo received a $1.25 million contract with the Air Force to see if the company’s gear could meet a standard rating scale that measures image interpretability. The tests included identifying hardware on electronics vans, fairings on fighter jets and missile tubes on warships.

In April 2023, the company received another $1.25 million contract — this time with the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, which assesses foreign threats. Late last year, it also signed a contract to have its technology assessed by the National Reconnaissance Office, which runs the nation’s spy satellites.

Albedo’s website says its imagery can help governments “monitor hotspots, eliminate uncertainty, and mobilize with speed.” The company, in listing its core values, says it supports “data-driven investigative journalism” among other activities that “ensure we improve the world we live in.”

Illustrating the fleet’s observational powers, Mr. Tri, the Albedo co-founder, said the space cameras could detect such vehicle details as sunroofs, racing stripes and items in a flatbed truck. “In some cases,” he said, “we may even be able to identify particular vehicles, which hasn’t been possible up to this point.”

The company expects civilian customers to include city planners looking for potholes on roads, conservation groups tracking wildlife, insurance companies surveying roof damage and power line companies seeking to prevent wildfires.

John E. Pike, director of Global Security.org, a nonprofit research group based in Alexandria, Va., said Albedo was downplaying what could become significant.

“You’re going to start seeing people,” he said. “You’re going to see more than dots.” Satellite images of Palestinians fleeing fighting in the Gaza Strip, Mr. Pike noted, illustrate the current observational limits. The images show either dense crowds in which no individuals can be discerned or — in the case of smaller groups of people on roads — tiny flecks and dark spots.

Mr. Pike echoed Mr. Haddad in saying the new technology would be unable to identify particular individuals. However, he said the space cameras would most likely be able to distinguish children from adults as well as sunbathers in swimsuits from those in further states of undress.

“This is the archetypal, first-order privacy concern — that somebody would see you sunbathing,” Mr. Pike said.

Legal experts note that drones are highly regulated by federal, state and local laws that make them subject to claims of trespass and privacy violation. No-fly zones include not only airports, military bases and sporting events but individuals. California law bars drone operators, unless they have permission, from taking pictures of people engaged in private, personal or family activities.

Ms. Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said her discouraging experience with satellite regulators a half decade ago suggested to her that little would be done to mandate a protection of privacy from the eyes in the sky.

Albedo and its backers, she added, are “operating with blinders on and not seeing the ramifications” for human rights.

February is usually frigid perfection for the ice rink at Millennium Park in downtown Chicago, a favorite winter stop for tourists and local families that stands in the shadow of the reflective sculpture known as the Bean.

On Tuesday morning, the rink was melting.

Under an intense sun and 70-degree air temperatures, water slowly trickled out of the empty rink, flooding the surrounding concrete. Baby birds splashed happily in the pools of water. The ticket counter was abandoned, apparently closed for the day.

Winter in Chicago — or the lack of it — reached an unnerving peak on Tuesday, when the city came close to breaking a 48-year-old high-temperature record.

But forecasters said that the balmy spell was not going to last. They pointed out that the mild conditions in Chicago and around the Midwest this week were extreme, not just for the warmth but also for what would follow.

That was likely to include plunging temperatures dropping into the 20s, blustery northwest winds gusting up to 40 miles an hour and potentially dangerous storms, including tornadoes.

Still, for most of Tuesday, Chicago looked and felt like summer: Apartment windows were pushed open to catch the warm breeze. Restaurants set up tables and chairs on sidewalks for al fresco lunch service, a rare sight in a Chicago February.

The lakefront was teeming with runners, cyclists and couples strolling hand in hand.

“We expected it would be very cold,” said Ana Marchal, 41, a doctor from Cádiz, Spain, who arrived in Chicago on Monday for a vacation with her husband, Rolf Hartmann.

They had figured on spending their holiday indoors, by shopping, visiting museums or attending Blackhawks and Bulls games.

Instead, they found themselves walking on the beach, looking delighted and a little perplexed. They stopped to take a selfie by Lake Michigan, which is usually icy and forbidding this time of year.

“How beautiful,” Mr. Hartmann said. “It looks like the sea.”

“It’s colder in Spain than here,” Dr. Marchal said.

Others found the weather ominous.

Shailaja Chandrashekararao, a social worker who moved from India to Chicago last year, had just finished a 10-kilometer jog downtown. She said she would have liked to keep running.

“It was too hot,” Ms. Chandrashekararao said, tugging at the sleeve of her neon-orange workout top.

Climate change has made summers in India unbearably, dangerously brutal, she said, making Chicago something of a weather haven. But the city’s mild winter, on the heels of the warmest year on record in 2023, felt eerie and unpredictable.

“I’m not enjoying this,” she said. “It’s quite crazy, actually.”

Temperatures are also rising across the Midwest, in part because of human-caused climate change, according to the 2023 National Climate Assessment, the government’s premier compilation of scientific knowledge on the effect of human-caused warming. The report also noted that the warming posed significant economic risk to the region.

The June-like temperatures will be one factor in producing severe thunderstorms in the Chicago area Tuesday evening and overnight. Some of the storms could spawn tornadoes, forecasters said, with the most likely area stretching from Missouri across southern Illinois and northern Indiana to Michigan. Tornadoes that occur after dark can be more dangerous because so many people are asleep.

The main threat from the storm system, though, will be hail, possibly including hailstones as large or larger than hen’s eggs.

Unseasonably high temperatures across the Great Plains, along with high winds, were propelling wildfires in Nebraska and Kansas, which were still a threat on Tuesday after forcing evacuations this week. Wildfires were also raging across the Texas Panhandle.

And from Tuesday to Wednesday in Chicago, the temperature could drop by nearly 60 degrees, according to David King, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service.

“It’s remarkable,” he said, noting that the last time the city saw such a rapid temperature drop was in the 1990s. “It’s just a wild time for weather here in Chicago.”

A normal daytime high in Chicago at this time of year is about 40 degrees. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, only 4.3 percent of the Great Lakes’ surface is ice-covered, well below the average.

The unseasonably warm and dry winter has affected tourism in the region, especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, where industries that depend on snow have suffered. Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin announced last week that many businesses in northern Wisconsin — ski slopes, restaurants and snowmobiling tours, for example — may be eligible for a federal disaster loan program if they have incurred losses from the mild winter.

The mild day on Tuesday was already feeling familiar, said Charles Jones, who manages maintenance work for a residential building in downtown Chicago.

Mr. Jones spent his break standing outside in short sleeves, as people walked their dogs in the sunshine. He has lived in Chicago his whole life, he said, and was used to the harsh winters that the city is known for. But it was hard to remember the last winter where the cold had felt truly brutal — “a few years ago, maybe,” he shrugged.

This winter has been a lot like the one before, Mr. Jones said, without very much snow or many cold, icy days. In the last few months, he said, he has only had to salt the sidewalk twice.

“I don’t trust this weather, though,” he said. “You know we’re going to get a little snow before winter is done. It’s Chicago. It can be 70 and then jump down to 30.”

Judson Jones contributed reporting.

Since Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud last year, he has hired a new lawyer known for courtroom showmanship. A group of sympathetic law professors has pushed for a reappraisal of his actions. And his parents have turned for help to former employees of FTX, the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange he founded.

From a federal detention center in Brooklyn, Mr. Bankman-Fried, 31, has continued to fight his case behind the scenes, as he aims for a lenient sentence and prepares to appeal his conviction. On Tuesday, his lawyers filed a legal memo in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, arguing that he should receive a prison sentence of between five and a quarter and six and a half years.

Mr. Bankman-Fried is “deeply, deeply sorry” for “the pain he caused over the last two years,” the memo said. “His sole focus after the collapse of FTX was making customers whole.”

The filing was a crucial step before Mr. Bankman-Fried’s sentencing on March 28, when the federal judge overseeing his case, Lewis A. Kaplan, will decide how long to imprison the onetime billionaire on charges that carry a maximum sentence of 110 years. But it was only one prong of a long-shot strategy orchestrated by Mr. Bankman-Fried’s family and friends to reverse his conviction and engineer a public reappraisal of his leadership at FTX.

Since last year’s trial, Mr. Bankman-Fried has hired Marc Mukasey, who once represented former President Donald J. Trump, to oversee his sentencing, as well as a separate lawyer at the law firm Shapiro Arato Bach to handle the appeal. His parents, the Stanford University law professors Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, have also been involved in the defense, helping line up people to write letters vouching for their son’s character that were included in the sentencing memo.

In an interview, Natalie Tien, a former assistant to Mr. Bankman-Fried at FTX, said she had written a letter for the memo after exchanging emails with Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried.

“I don’t have grudges over him, and I do feel bad for his parents,” Ms. Tien said.

A spokesman for Mr. Bankman-Fried declined to comment. Representatives for Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried did not respond to requests for comment.

Federal prosecutors are set to outline their own sentencing recommendation in a filing due March 15. But according to Mr. Bankman-Fried’s memo, a probation officer has already recommended a 100-year sentence, a punishment his lawyers called “barbaric.”

Even if Judge Kaplan decides not to impose the maximum sentence, Mr. Bankman-Fried could face decades behind bars.

The judge “could still give a very serious sentence given how young Mr. Bankman-Fried is — say, a 30- or 35-year sentence,” said Miriam Baer, vice dean at Brooklyn Law School.

A spokesman for Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, declined to comment.

Before FTX collapsed in November 2022, Mr. Bankman-Fried was one of the most prominent figures in the renegade crypto industry, a widely celebrated billionaire whose face was splashed across billboards and magazine covers.

In October, a federal jury convicted him of stealing $8 billion from FTX’s customers to finance political contributions, investments in other companies and lavish real estate purchases.

Mr. Bankman-Fried has maintained he is innocent and pledged to appeal. This month, he replaced his trial lawyers, Mark Cohen and Christian Everdell, with Mr. Mukasey, who is representing another fallen crypto mogul in a separate case and has a reputation for forceful courtroom presentations.

Last year, Mr. Mukasey scored a victory in his defense of Trevor Milton, the founder of the electric truck manufacturer Nikola, who was convicted in 2022 of defrauding investors. A federal judge sentenced Mr. Milton in December to four years in prison, far less than the 11 years that prosecutors had requested.

Working in parallel to Mr. Mukasey is an appellate lawyer and former prosecutor, Alexandra Shapiro, who is a partner at Shapiro Arato Bach. She is expected to file Mr. Bankman-Fried’s appeal after the sentencing.

Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried have also played a role behind the scenes. Last month, Ms. Tien said, she received a text from one of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s supporters, asking whether she would help with the memo. Then she got a follow-up email from the FTX founder’s parents explaining the sentencing process and urging her to write “from the heart” about their son.

They were “kind of like testing the waters,” Ms. Tien said in an interview. “I pretty much just said ‘yes’ right away.”

Ms. Tien was one of 29 people who wrote letters for the memo, including Mr. Bankman-Fried’s parents, his younger brother and several former colleagues. She called him kind and empathetic and said he had “never acted out of greed or self-interest.”

In the filing, Mr. Mukasey cited the letters to paint Mr. Bankman-Fried as a hard-working, altruistic billionaire who eschewed the trappings of fame and wealth. He also argued that some oddities in the mogul’s behavior could be explained by “neurodiversity.”

Mr. Bankman-Fried has “outward characteristics typical of neurodiversity, such as inconsistent eye contact,” the memo said. “He can be perceived as abrupt, dismissive, evasive, detached or uncaring.”

Outside the formal court process, law professors who know Mr. Bankman-Fried’s parents have also pressed his case.

In January, two close family friends, the Yale Law professor Ian Ayres and the Stanford Law professor John Donohue, wrote an essay for the website Project Syndicate, arguing that “all along” FTX had enough assets to make its customers whole — a point that Mr. Mukasey echoed in the memo.

“Whatever else might be said about Bankman-Fried, he was a brilliant businessman,” Mr. Ayres and Mr. Donohue wrote.

Another law professor, Jonathan Lipson at Temple University, said in an interview that he was working with David Skeel of the University of Pennsylvania law school on an academic paper criticizing Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm overseeing FTX’s bankruptcy.

In September, Mr. Lipson co-wrote a brief in the bankruptcy case arguing for the appointment of an independent examiner to review Sullivan & Cromwell’s actions, including its close collaboration with federal prosecutors. He said that he had spoken with Mr. Bankman-Fried and his mother last year after another Stanford law professor reached out about the case and offered to put them in contact.

In their article, Mr. Lipson and Mr. Skeel argue that Sullivan & Cromwell “may have distorted the criminal justice process” by giving prosecutors wide-ranging access to FTX’s resources and data, according to an unpublished draft shared with The New York Times.

A Sullivan & Cromwell spokesman declined to comment. In court filings, prosecutors have described the information sharing as “routine practices by companies cooperating in an investigation.”

Mr. Bankman-Fried faces long odds. Criminal convictions are rarely overturned on appeal.

Since last summer, he has been housed at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he has spent much of his time working on the case, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Mr. Bankman-Fried has also shared crypto market tips with the guards, the person said, recommending investments in the digital coin Solana.

This month, Mr. Bankman-Fried left the detention center for his first public court appearance since the trial, a hearing to authorize his new legal representation. In a Manhattan courtroom, he appeared clean-shaven and wore a loosefitting brown prison uniform. At times, he turned around and smiled at the reporters sitting in the gallery.

J. Edward Moreno contributed reporting.