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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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No real surprise that folks are spotting these things. It's a little hard to hide something orbiting the earth--it's not like one can really hide it behind a bush or under a rock. ...though it might be interesting to insert a spy satellite into an upper stage of a rocket that delivers an otherwise innocuous communications satellite, come to think of it...
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
If you look at the satobs site, it hasn't been updated since 2004. WTF?
Can all fish swim?
to these people that they need to get out more, but it appears they already do.
And:"If Ted can track all these satellites," Mr. Pike said, "so can the Chinese."
That's damn straight. WTF is it with Government when they say shit like this? What, they think the rest of the World is too stupid to do this? Or photos in the airports by security. I got news for the Government: there are folks out there that have great memories and can draw. Go through security, look around, and then draw what you saw when you sit down and no one will no any different.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
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.
I'm a big fan of Heavens Above, http://www.heavens-above.com/
Yes it is very easy. all you need to look for the three sided black symbol printed on a yellow square or circle.
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://bp1.blogger.com/_BYX14125JUQ/RpVqASyl-cI/AAAAAAAADU8/R2ettoJs-Z8/s400/Nuclear_Warning_Symbol.gif&imgrefurl=http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/2007_07_08_archive.html&h=225&w=225&sz=8&tbnid=Ov10iqjDEvf1QM:&tbnh=108&tbnw=108&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dnuclear%2Bsymbol%26um%3D1&start=3&sa=X&oi=images&ct=image&cd=3
take the above for example. They print them HUGE on the satellite to make sure the aliens and astronauts don't go messing with the satellites for fun.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Say that three times real fast and you're admitted to the Satellite Stalkers club.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why don't they all just paint their satellites black?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Put on your skeptical hats. Do you really think there are "huge machines" in low earth orbit that nobody else, aside from the link, can see? John Walson isn't the only one watching the sky. There are people who do this for a living and nobody else can see what he is seeing. As in, not a single person has been able to confirm his "finding". Therefore, one can only conclude that he is full of it.
/. of all places. Wow....how far we've fallen.
There is no mystery because there are no machines.
I can't believe the parent got modded up on
Also, large machines orbiting his house:
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx2.htm
The Black Ops boys must have money to burn if they can send a gdam CHINOOK to photograph him
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
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.
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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HI, Quite interesting re painting satellites black. If you look at some of the photos of the recent 'wideband gapfiller satellite', the satellite bus is mostly black. http://www.boeing.com/ids/news/2006/q3/060926b_pr.html has a picture of the satellite in a frame prior to testing. If you look at it, you can see all the communications antennas are black. I'm not sure is this is painted for stealth reasons, or the antennas are made of carbon fiber. I'm sure this is only one example of many recent satellites that have been painted black.Either way, painting a satellite would only solve a small amount of the problem, since pretty much all satellites carry an RF payload which transmits data back to earth, they can be detected this way if they cannot be seen. The article mentions the 'seesat' group which does visual obs, but a parallel group 'hearsat' works with the RF downlinks, identifying satellites purely by their RF fingerprints. In fact several satellites have been detected at RF, orbits computed which were then passed on to the 'seesat' folks for visual confirmation. There are a few sites that you can check out if you are interested in the RF Aspects of satellite detection, www.hearsat.org, www.satellitenwelt.de and www.uhf-satcom.com being just a few.