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Space Spotters Track Secret Satellites
Ponca City, We Love You writes "When government officials announced last month that a top-secret spy satellite would come falling out of the sky they said little about the satellite itself. They didn't need to. Spotters equipped with little more than a pair of binoculars, a stop watch and star charts, had already uncovered some of the deepest of the government's expensive secrets and shared them on the Internet. Thousands of people form the spotter community. Many look for historical relics of the early space age, working from publicly available orbital information. Still others are drawn to the secretive world of spy satellites, with about a dozen hobbyists doing most of the observing. When a new spy satellite is launched the hobbyists will collaborate on sightings around the world to determine its orbit, and even guess at its function. They often share their information on their web site, satobs.org."
It is actually getting harder to identify satellites due to the efforts that certain governments are taking, including building in additional propulsion and stealth features built into the latest launches to alter and conceal orbits from those that might be predicted from launch. This is to prevent not only the ability to track orbits and know when a particular platform may be overhead, but it also prevents many of the current technologies like adaptive optics from being able to identify features of orbiting satellites as shown here .
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If you look at the satobs site, it hasn't been updated since 2004. WTF?
Can all fish swim?
The links in TFA aren't very good - theres a site
here that does real time sat tracking (ooh, animated over google maps).
I looked there last week and they didn't have enough data to show the orbit but it seems they have some elements now.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
I'm a big fan of Heavens Above, http://www.heavens-above.com/
This is exactly what the alien invaders did in one episode of the old "U.F.O." T.V. series: http://ufoseries.com/
At the risk that this might (not) be a genuine question - because anything black gets awfully hot in space (solar heating, and no way to shed it again other than radiating it). A vacuum is a wonderful thermal insulation, which is why one of the biggest conceptual problems for all spacecraft (and suits) is to get rid of the heat they inevitably generate additionally to what they pick up from the sun, counterintuitive to the public misconception of space being "cold". And still you probably couldn't paint it black enough that it would disappear in front of the as-black-as-it-gets backdrop that is the blackness of space itself. No, if you want to hide something visually in space, you need a mirror, because at the proper angle it would show you nothing but that blackness.
Doc, you need to subscribe to some technical literature instead of the nuclear paranoia you seem to subscribe to. This situation is pretty obvious if you bother to think instead of knee-jkerk react. You seem to start with the pre-judeged assumption that some sort of comic-book conspiracy of evil overlords runs the US Intelligence agencies and will irrationally choose evil nukes over engineering practicality, in order to be more menacing.
Wrong. Be rational. There are solid engineering and budgetary reasons at work here. No "secrecy" can hide those issues, no matter the classification fo the satellite. Physics, like mathematics, sooner or later breaks attempts at classifying it. And there are limits on the money spent, even in a "black" budget project. If things go bad, you can bet overspending will leak out. Google SBIRS-High for a good example - look at the globalsecurity.org entry (pic is taken looking S from Buckley AFB - I used to live to the west of that hill full of houses in Aurora CO).
The weight and expense to power ratio for plutonium or other decay based power systems is too high compared to solar arrays and batteries when in low earth orbit. The stuff that uses nukes is generally interplanetary in nature and cannot depend on solar. This is especially true with US launched stuff. Plus, nuclear power units have too high a heat signature to be used for "stealthy" sats, and are heavy and too expensive to launch if there is a cost-worthy alternative. Which there is: good ol' solar arrays, nice and thin.
The intelligence agencies would much rather have more gizmos if given the choice. Solar arrays provide them with better weight tradeoffs, and more power as well -- meaning they can add more stuff and use more power hungry stuff. And they are cheaper to deploy, and less likely to run afoul of regulatory issues i.e. try dragging a nuc design for LOE (low earth orbit) in front of an Engineering Design Review board - they'll laugh you out of the room for being politically stupid.
And if you are talking about the voiced concerns that the satellite in question (US-193, NROL-21) has hazardous material, well that hazmat is rocket fuel for orbital manuvering - the full load of it given that the sat never deployed the solar arrays, nor attemted to manuver to a more stable higher orbit. Chemicals. Not nukes.
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As opposed to the hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of space junk that are already passing over their country.
There's a lot of junk up there in pretty regular orbits. Most of it's not low enough for a standard spy satellite but it's not like space is a pristine clean area where only designated satellites are flying around and there's nothing else up there...
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing