Slashdot Mirror
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."
Which is what would make a discarded upper stage ideal--because you would expect it to be in a lower orbit than the satellite that it pushed out. Blow off a couple side panels, stabilize the tumble into something useful, and you're in with flynn.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Well most developed nations could develop radar installations to track space junk and their own satellites.
(I just wanted to know about the object size one can track and found some interesting paper:
http://www.esa.int/esapub/bulletin/bullet109/chapter16_bul109.pdf)
Also consider the Chinese anti missile test some months ago, the Chinese should also be able to track their
space junk if this experiment was to be meaningful.
The problem is though that even lesser developed Nations without their own space program have the need to protect
their defense installations. Even though their means might be limited they certainly can do damage to an attacker
within range of their defenses. So even they want to detect the prying eyes in the sky.
What they probably don't have is the same number of guys with a telescope, spare time, and the education to hunt
for satellites and even guess their purpose. Combined with a distribution medium like the internet for collaboration
and collection of information that a bunch of amateurs would have come up with easily, this would become a valuable
source of information to those lesser developed nations. This would only cost you an internet connection and an OLPC.
Je me souviens.
All orbits are regular--and one could always fake an accident with the thruster at the end "pushing it into an unexpected orbit"
And not all the tumble would need to be removed--just set it into a tumble that would allow the cameras or other instruments on board to record properly, on an axis around the camera lens, say.
Hell, I'm surprised they haven't done something like that already.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
An interesting fact I learned listening to some of the MIT lectures available online about the history and development of the Shuttle: One of the military requirements of the Shuttle was that it had at least 1400 miles crossrange. This was so for example, in a time of crisis (the shuttle was designed during the Cold War after all), the Shuttle could be launched from Vandenberg AFB into a polar orbit, immediately drop a spy satellite into orbit on the first go around (to prevent an enemy from learning the projected orbital path of the spy satellite by tracking the shuttle through multiple orbits), and then come right back to land on the west coast. Of course the earth would have rotated eastwards during that 90 minute orbit, so the shuttle needed the crossrange to be able to also glide eastwards and make a landing. Some original designs showed the shuttle having straight wings; apparently one of the major reasons NASA went with a delta-wing configuration was to meet the crossrange requirement.