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Tracking Satellites That Aren't There
stacybro writes "Wired is running an interesting article about amateur astronomers tracking "black" satellites." From the article: "The observers, who congregate on a Web site called Heavens-Above and a mailing list called SeeSat-L, have amassed an impressive collection of information and expertise. For two decades, they have played a high tech game of hide-and-seek with the US's National Reconnaissance Office, a secretive satellite agency. By coordinating their efforts, amateur observers in Europe, North America, and South Africa monitor satellites at different phases of their journeys and extrapolate the precise dimensions of their orbits." This is in addition to the ones we know about and even the ones we think we know about.
Although in my gut I don't particularly like the fact that our military satellite orbits are known to all who care to look on the Internet, the article gets the moral of the story right.
If these guys can do it in their spare time with binoculars and phone calls, so can anyone else.
Time and time again security through obscurity has proven to be a fallacy.
And if this group has increased the awareness of that fact to the US military then they are indeed performing a valuable service.
The apparent fact that they forced a step-function change in satellite stealth technology (Misty, Misty2) offers convincing proof.
"Nothing to see here, please move along".
Never has it been so relevant.
For the record, Heavens-Above.com isn't just devoted to tracking spy sats, although I would have gotten that impression from the blurb. The site tracks all kinds of satellites -- including ISS, the shuttle (if it were up), and the Iridium constellation. It's not just for people with a specific interest in spy sats and it is in fact very handy if you want to see what you might be able to see on a given night before going out to observe. (Showing friends or students the shuttles, the space station, or Iridium flares is pretty neat, so I always take a look before observing.)
I sometimes wonder, when I read stories like this, if the government is smarter than think. What if these "holes" in national security are just bones the government is throwing to the public to make them seem like they can't hide anything? Just a wacky conspiracy theory for a boring Wednesday afternoon.
The last bit on "How to Track a Black Bird" doesn't seem to say anything about making sure to avoid looking at the sun especially with binoculars.
Because there is evidence that the same organizations whose purpose is going after what you call "bad" people are increasingly turning their weapons against us. When agents from a bureau whose self-stated mission is "to protect and defend the United States against terrorist and foreign intelligence threats and to enforce the criminal laws of the United States" come to believe they have the right to collect any data at all about you, even library cards, without any valid search warrant, you should better start worrying. In my dictionary, an officer of the government who feels no need to respect the Constitution is as "Bad" as it gets.
Amassing as much data as we can about the methods and equipment those secret agencies have that they could use against us is an act of collective self-defense. It goes in the same spirit as the freedom to "keep and bear arms" against an opressive government.
...against a black background?
It's on fire?
The public satellites are the ones that we know that we know, and these are the ones we know we don't know.
What about the ones that we don't know that we don't know?
Here are the names, locations, and frequencies of all the US Spy Satellites:
Freq Az Dir Velocity Alt
[Edited by NSA]
[Edited by NSA]
[Edited by NSA]
[Edited by NSA]
[Edited by NSA]
[Edited by NSA]
Maybe it's one thing to find this stuff out for yourself, but posting it online?
Thats just giving away information. Of course, there are some 8,000 man made objects in orbit right now that are tracked by our government... most of it is just trash though.
http://www.stratcom.mil/fact_sheets/fact_spc.html
Ever heard of a reaction wheel? Basically, it's a spinning gyroscope, with a servo on the end of the axis. By turning against the force axis, a satellite (or the space station, or any other body) can reorient itself. With enough surplus solar power budget for this sort of thing, a satellite could rotate at will without burning a limited resource like propellant.
-JT
A government agency of any size will be able to afford radar to track our sattelites. These provide much more accurate and instantaneous data than what individual video observations can provide.
Here's a report on the NOSS sattelites with a wealth of information about the sats that no amateur could ever get.
While individual terrorists probably don't have the resources (beyond heavens-above) to track sattelites, they probably aren't moving things obvious enough to matter anyway.
Yes, I've heard of them... even saw them being manufactured once at a Honeywell plant. But the poster did not say that propellant was the *only* way to move a satellite. The discussion was about hiding satellites and changing their orbits to avoid detection. That's not something you're going to do without propellant (and a lot of it).
Reaction wheels are great, but they only have a few real uses. One is to orient the satellite for communicating with Earth, or aiming a telescope at a star, etc. Another is to orient the satellite before igniting the engine, but, as the poster mentioned, most sats contain little additional fuel after they have been placed in their intended orbits.
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
There's an extra iridium sat or two up there. I went out to view a flare, and saw it.... but it was brighter than I was expecting. Less than a minute later I saw the real flare.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
You can't change an orbit with a reaction wheel. Reaction wheels are for pointing and positioning. the delta V required for even a degree of plane change is enormous.