WASHINGTON -- Forty years ago last month, a top-secret U.S. spy satellite code-named CORONA snapped a series of grainy, black-and-white photographs of selected missile sites in the Soviet Union.

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It was a difficult, high-risk mission that brought back the world's first pictures from space and, according to the men who worked on it, helped preserve the peace between two Cold War superpowers.

Though CORONA has been declassified for five years, the names and contributions of all the men who designed, built and launched it and other spy satellites have remained largely in the shadows. Until now.

As part of its ceremonies marking nearly 40 years as an institution, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in Chantilly, Virginia on September 27 is honoring 56 pioneers and founders who contributed to the development of national space reconnaissance.

The only other time they were brought together was in 1985 in a secret ceremony at Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Then each of them was each given a small bronze medal engraved with the words "Space Pioneer."

Now they will be honored for a lasting contribution that has spanned the decades.

"Without their contributions we wouldn't have the capabilities we have today," said Bob McDonald, director of the NRO's Center for the Study of National Reconnaissance.

"From a national reconnaissance perspective, we wouldn't have been in a position to really win the Cold War. It was their work that provided the confidence for policy makers from Eisenhower up to the present to actually know what the enemy was doing," McDonald said.

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Spy-satellite programs like CORONA and its offspring drew people from many resources, including the CIA, along with military and aerospace contractors like TRW, Lockheed and General Electric. But the work was so secretive that often people in one office would have no idea who else was contributing to the effort.

"These programs were highly classified and highly compartmentalized," McDonald said. "Only as you moved up the line would you know who was doing what. People on a contractor team might not even know that other people in the same company were working on the same project they were."

Some of the pioneers feel its high time their contributions were recognized.

"The whole idea of doing this is in the open is one that I'm very high on," said Richard Leghorn of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

As an Air Force colonel in 1946, Leghorn pushed the concept the peacetime strategic reconnaissance as a means to warn of military and strategic surprise. He later founded the Itek Corporation of Lexington, Massachusetts, which built the lenses and cameras for CORONA and other systems.

CORONA itself was fraught with difficulty, Leghorn recalled.

"If it hadn't been for Eisenhower staying with it, it never would have happened. We had a new booster, the Thor, and a new satellite, the Agena. Then you had a camera that had never been built before, with film that was completely new. Add to that the fact that you had to grab the package from the air.

"All those elements were new and to get them to work together was really a fantastic achievement. It was a very hairy exercise. If you'd had today's process of review committees, CORONA wouldn't have lasted beyond two or three failures," Leghorn said.

CORONA in fact suffered 12 straight failures before the 13th flight worked. But that flight lacked a camera so it wasn't until the 14th mission -- on August 18, 1960 -- that CORONA was successful.

To get the film home, the satellite had to drop a capsule with the film toward Earth. Then, two small parachutes on the capsule opened to slow its speed. Finally, an Air Force C-119 aircraft swooped in to snatch the capsule in midair and returned it to Earth where CIA and Air Force technicians processed the film.

In a single day, CORONA had yielded more images of the Soviet Union than did the entire U-2 spy plane program. The satellite proved conclusively that the Soviets' missile force did not number in the hundreds, as the public had feared, but rather amounted to somewhere between 25 and 50. It was a fact, however, that was hidden from the American public for years.

In all, the CORONA program involved more than 100 satellite flights from 1960 to 1972 at a cost of about $850 million.

The imagery allowed the U.S. intelligence community to catalog Soviet air defense and antiballistic missile sites, nuclear weapons-related facilities and submarine bases along with military installations in China and Eastern Europe. CORONA also provided pictures in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and Soviet arms control compliance.

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Yet the world at large did not learn of CORONA until February 1995, when President Clinton ordered it declassified. More than 866,000 images have been transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C.

"I do believe that this kind of intelligence from space has certainly helped to preserve the peace. It kept the Cold War from developing to a hot war," said physicist Richard Garwin, another founder of CORONA. He served on President Nixon's Science Advisory Committee and chaired its panels on military aircraft.

CORONA, Garwin said, "denied the missile gap on which Kennedy had run in 1960. Although Eisenhower had offered Kennedy intelligence briefings, he didn't take him up on it. They were just wrong about their claims that the Soviets were ahead of the U.S. in missiles."

A side benefit of the CORONA program is that its recovery system helped NASA develop a means to retrieve its early astronauts and spacecraft upon splashdown, said NRO's McDonald.

"Whether it's a roll of film or an astronaut, you want to get that back to Earth safely," he said. "The recovery capability that the Corona program developed served as the basis for the recovery of people from space."

And the five Lunar Orbiter missions in 1966-67, which scouted landing sites for the Apollo moonwalkers, used imaging systems that were derived from CORONA's predecessors.

Today, commercial imaging satellites have moved way beyond the best CORONA could do, providing highly detailed images of things as small as a yard (meter) in size.

And that, in McDonald's estimation, presents new challenges to today's intelligence community.

"On the one hand, if there's a commercial supplier, then that takes some of the burden off the intelligence community" to produce such images, he said. "On the other hand, by making this imagery available to virtually anybody, you could have any government or terrorist group looking at the same thing you are."

"In the early days, you had only the U.S. or Soviets who could look from space. Now you have anybody who can look. You always want to build on the earlier capability but you also find that there are new challenges that require new capabilities."