Satellite Spotters Make Government Uneasy

An anonymous reader found an interesting little story about satellite spotters and how, not surprisingly, their painstakingly methodical hobby doesn't exactly make gazillion dollar government agencies all that excited. Of course the article raises the very obvious point that if a guy with a pair of binoculars in his back yard can spot a satellite, so can the Chinese government.

Comments

Same s**t, different wrapping.

[15Bit]

Not quite a dupe, but damn close:

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/05/1734208

Dupe

[mrxak]

Isn't this a dupe? I could've sworn there was an article about this just a week or two ago.

Re:Dupe

[pionzypher]

Modded flamebait? What the hell mods? He's right, this is a dupe of this store that was ran on the fifth.

Re:Dupe

[gruntled]

The New York Times owns the International Herald Tribune, the big European daily published out of Paris, so nearly any significant general interest story that shows up the NYT is reprinted in the IHT (I've gotten dual bylines out of this arrangement myself; sadly, one paycheck). A great deal of the IHT copy is just stuff that was in the NYT. If Slashdot editors have a system of tracking stories by publication venue, they might want to make note of this...

Re:well

[kannibal_klown]

I don't know what spy satellites look like, but I imagine they coud:

• Make it look like an ordinary weather/GPS/comm satellite.
• Go all out in trying to hide it
  • Encase it in the same material as the stealth bombers (radar)
  • Paint it black
  • Remove all blinking lights

The problem with the second option is that it would be even more expensive, and watchful eyes could still see it as it passes by a bright moon. And then there would be little doubt as to what kind of satellite they were looking at.

So sans a Star-Trek-style Cloaking Device, it will always be detectable at some leve. So they might as well just make it look like some random satellite so there's always a question as to what kind it is.

Re:Stealth Satellites?

[TripMaster Monkey]

Actually, we are, which neatly demolishes that argument.

Re:well

[Glock27]

So sans a Star-Trek-style Cloaking Device, it will always be detectable at some leve. So they might as well just make it look like some random satellite so there's always a question as to what kind it is.

It's worse than that. Visible light isn't the problem, it's self emission of long wave infrared (LWIR) radiation. The background of space is very cold (a few K above absolute zero), so anything with any significant temperature contrasts very nicely. In theory it might be possible to cool the front side of the (notionally black) satellite to near zero deg K, but in practice that'd take prohibitive energy, since that nice black surface would absorb a whole lot of solar energy when exposed (~1/2 the time).

So, civilian satellite spotters aren't the real problem, it's inimical militaries with LWIR telescopes...and there's pretty well nothing to be done about it.

Re:OSS wins once again

[Old VMS Junkie]

Ummmm.... no.
Satellites run proprietary, custom computers that run dedicated, real time operating systems.

Re:Stealth Satellites?

[TripMaster Monkey]

The fact that you can spot the satellite with binoculars proves my argument.

The fact that you can spot a spy satellite with binoculars proves that the government it belongs to isn't trying to hide it? Is that really what you're trying to say?

Here's some more reading for you.

And from an intel standpoint, this is one piece of a puzzle to knowing what the satellites are sued for but I'd rather have the Chinese or whoever have to pay for it themselves.

Um, I already exposed your contention that the Chinese are relying on American hobbyists with binoculars to locate spy satellites as a Straw Man argument. Please stop embarrassing yourself.

But go ahead, go report to your communist friends. It's your right.

Honestly...if you can't even be bothered to accept the most elementary facts of the situation, you're not worth responding to.
Good day, sir.

Re:There's only so much to see...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

According to the PBS special on the MOL project, the very first spy satellites had a resolution of 3 inches. That was in the 70's. I don't think they've gotten any worse over time.

Re:well

[ToteAdler]

If they wanted to make it look like a weather/GPS/comm satellite they'd have to put it in a much much higher orbit. The three you mentioned are geo-stationary satellites which orbit at 35,790 km while the spy satellites which go shooting around really fast are at an orbit of more like 700 to 800 km (satellite heights from NASA http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/SCOOL/orbits.html). So if you were trying to disguise as one of those, you'd need a much better camera and probably have to worry about other spotting problems and what not. They should just keep working on their replacement to the SR-71 so there isn't any to track.

Satellite registry

[Morty]

There is supposed to be an international registry of known satellites, although not all countries use it consistently, especially for military satellites.

Pretending that a spy satellite is a different kind of satellite probably wouldn't work too well. First, different kinds of satellites use different orbits. Even more importantly, non-military US satellites have lots of publicly available information. Non-military satellites are usually either scientific instruments or commercial assets. The paper trail on a "real" non-military satellite would be hard to reproduce in a convincing way.

GPS satellites are not geostationary

[jvonk]

The GPS constellation of 24 satellites are arranged in six different orbital planes, each inclined 55 degrees to the equator. To obtain exactly two orbits per day, the satellites are placed at an altitude of 20,200km. "Look Ma, I didn't even cite Wikipedia!"

Dupe

[Fnord666]

If you would like to see the previous discussion of the exact same article published on the same day(although published through a slightly different outlet), please see the discussion here.