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

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: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: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.

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.