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

Re:well

[KublaiKhan]

Just what I came in to say. If you're going to be putting up a covert satellite, you should put some sort of countermeasures on it to make sure nobody can see it.

What the US gov't should do is encourage this satellite spotting for two reasons:

Number 1, as mentioned, it's one hell of a great stress test for your anti-spotting capabilities if everybody's looking for it.

Number 2, if you have everyone keeping track of the -foreign- satellites as well, then you have a very large volunteer intel force to take advantage of.

There's really no such thing as secrecy--there's just things that haven't been found out yet.

Re:What's this new obsession with the Chinese...

[Gyga]

Why Americans are uneasy about China: China owns American hand, foot, and soul. China is not a democracy. China has blatant censorship and other policies that Americans hate. Americans like pretending such policies don't exist here. China is one of the few contries that have a military that can take ours and who is not a trustworthy friend.

China is not the issue.

[donscarletti]

"If Ted can track all these satellites," Pike said, "so can the Chinese."

Of course the Chinese can track these satellites, the Chinese have a multi-trillion dollar economy. With that you can afford the education, staff and equipment to track satellites with far more accuracy than these hobbyists since they can use things like Radar and large telescopes. The Chinese got these things by being a stable and peaceful (albeit repressive) state. The Chinese know where the satellites but they're not the ones who anyone's worried about. Smaller groups such as certain terrorist organisations possibly do not have the organisation or patience to find out this information themselves, but they do have the ability to look up web pages.

Despite their benign intentions, there are consequences for exposing any information of this nature. Information has always been one of the most important weapons in any human conflicts. Whether you believe you have a nationalistic duty to protect the secrets of your nation and its allies or not, one must consider that by publishing data of this nature, despite it just being numbers one can calculate in one's backyard can result in bad things happening to good people. One must consider that just because one is fairly safe from terrorism in most of the developed world, it is a way of life in Northern India, Pakistan, Israel, Iraq where it claims life on a steady basis, if public satellite data prevents the governments of these regions from suppressing those who attack civilians, then those deaths are a consequence of the publishing of the information. This isn't about protection of the revenue model of some fat record labels, this isn't about exposing government lies or software patents. This is information who's revelation could lead to death and it should be treated with serious discretion.

Re:China is not the issue.

[nagora]

This is information who's revelation could lead to death.

In what way? And are there really no people working for highly-funded terrorist networks who can't afford a decent telescope and take advantage of the dark, dark desert nights? If they can't get as good a dataset as these hobbyists then they're probably not much of a threat.

TWW

Re:well

[CarpetShark]

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22689812-2,00.html

They act hostile towards us ...

[AHumbleOpinion]

First of all we aren't all American here so we don't all quite understand this paranoia about the Chinese.

Well they are number one with respect to industrial and military espionage directed at us. They attempt to manipulate our electoral system with illegal campaign contributions. Their military is a bit aggressive with us, recall their ramming of our surveillance aircraft and the games played with the aircraft on the ground. Their currency manipulation to remain an extremely inexpensive exporter. The blind eye turned towards piracy and counterfeiting. Their involvement in the drug trade (precursor chemicals and opium exports, and money laundering). Their transfer of ballistic missile and nuclear technologies. ... Then there is also the little detail that they have militarily attacked us, they entered the Korean War to save the North Koreans when they were on the verge of defeat.

Now look at how they treat their own citizens. The growing unrest of these citizens. The unavoidable crisis coming as the countryside becomes even poorer, and the population becomes older overall, ... They seem well poised to need a diversion and a scapegoat. We seem to be their number one candidate. The cold war only ended in the west, in the east the same people are still running things. Only their strategy has changed.

Planespotters are certainly a threat

[billstewart]

Planespotting seems to be more of a European obsession than an American one; perhaps it's a leftover from WWII and the Cold War. But recently it's been a problem for the US government - planespotters tracked a bunch of those CIA "extraordinary rendition" kidnapping flights that the US pretended weren't happening.

Re:well

[KublaiKhan]

Or build it into an upper stage for a legit satellite, such that it enters into an 'effective' orbit after putting the legit satellite where it needs to be.

You get two satellites up there for the price of one, in essence, while disguising that one of 'em -is- a satellite, rather than just another discarded upper stage of a rocket.

There are several advantages of this method of doing things:

Number 1, you don't have to hide that it's up there at all. You can have everyone looking at it, but unless they spot the camera aperture, they're not likely to guess that it's being used for anything at all.

Number 2, because you don't have to worry about hiding it, you've got a bit more elbowroom--you don't have to fit it into a tiny form factor, or worry too much about hardening the electronics against excessive heat buildup. Wrap the thing in gold foil if you like, as nobody's going to see it inside the booster's skin. If you're clever, you can run the antenna out one of the ends without anything being too obvious.

Number 3, the cost of putting it up is lessened, because the company that's buying the shot will not necessarily even know that there's a hanger-on sitting below their TV satellite or whatnot.

Number 3b, because of the reduced cost, you can put more of 'em up and get better coverage.

Number 4, not only will the booster help hide the satellite from prying eyes visually, it will also hide it on infrared wavelengths--because of course the booster will be a bit warm; it's got a lot of mass and a fairly large size to pick up radiation with during the day.

Sure, there are some drawbacks--it may require some work to fit the components in around existing fuel tanks and the like--but it's doable, it's doable with today's technology, it's doable for less money than many other solutions, and, frankly, given my track record for ingenious ideas, it's probably already being done by at least three governments.

Re:What's this new obsession with the Chinese...

[EnglishTim]

Er... Russia still has over 5,800 active nuclear warheads (As compared to a little over 5,100 belongin to the USA). Their conventional army isn't as powerful as the United States' but they're still quite capable of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Re:[OT] GPS = 30 years old

[Anonymous Coward]

And the GPS program was well underway about 10 years prior to the first launch. I worked on some of the software for the on-board receiver software around 1971. I say "on-board" because it was presumed that the system would fill most of a standard rack with electronics and would be used by the US Navy fleet. The current generation of cheap, handheld devices were completely unanticipated. Amazing what something approaching 40 years of technology advances have given us.

Space is not so secret

[AeroIllini]

Maybe, just maybe, the CIA shouldn't be placing big honking satellites they want to keep secret in very predictable, visible orbits.

Do human spies walk in the middle of a great big plaza in full sunshine on a predictable rotation if they want to stay hidden? Of course not-- they stick to the shadows, and they vary their route.

Spy satellites are going to be a relic of the past pretty soon anyway, as radar-invisible high-altitude drone planes are becoming the norm. A drone does not have a set flight path like an orbit, so the enemy can't predict where it's going to go even if it is spotted. It flies in the atmosphere, so the IR contrast with the rest of space is not there, and it's made of radar-absorbing materials that make it all but invisible. Add in some visual camouflage (like painting the underside the same color as the sky) and reduce the engine noise with cleverly shaped nozzles, and the enemy will never even know it's there. As the technology to fly these things gets better and the drones themselves get longer range, we might not even need spy satellites anymore.

Satellites with cameras will always be useful for Earth Science and other pursuits. But they might not be the best vector for obtaining covert high-altitude images of enemy territory anymore.

Re:well

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Then there's always the hilarity that would ensue from an Anglo South African immigrant. Nothing like a white, British-accented person checking off the box "African-American" under race.

That's exactly my father's situation -- he's a white immigrant from South Africa and takes glee in calling himself African-American whenever that nomenclature comes up. Now, he's culturally very English (as opposed to Boer) so he's usually too quiet and polite to bring it up, but he's got some great stories from corporate "sensitivity training" classes and the like.

Three words

[Anonymous Coward]

Cosmic
Microwave
Background

I.e. the black stuff away from the sun radiates mostly as if it were 3kelvin.

That's cold.

cf the orbital temperature at the earth orbit: about 220 kelvin.

Radiated energy sigma time temperature to the fourth power.

Re:well

[plover]

There's a huge problem with this idea. To be effective, spy satellites have to be aimed. They don't just hover over interesting parts of the world, they orbit the globe while the earth spins beneath them. And interesting parts of the world don't magically appear beneath their tracks. To aim them means to change their orbit so they fly over the parts that you currently find interesting.

Rocket boosters are mostly uninteresting because they do not have to be aimed -- they are transferred once to a parking orbit, and there they stay until decay drops them back to earth.

But if a rocket booster were to change orbits more than twice, it would suddenly become a very interesting rocket booster.

Other than a handful of satellites with wide public visibility, payloads are not identified. Amateurs label them as they spot them, but civilians don't know for sure if satellite USA-193 is a spy satellite, military satellite, or whatever. The only thing the spotters know is that if a satellite changes orbits, someone on the ground surely cares about it. Yes, if something is dumped into a parking orbit and never changes, it will likely be ignored. But a never changing spy satellite isn't going to see much of the world, and will be pretty useless to its masters.

Re:well

[azrider]

If you're looking where there should be nothing and there's a moving object, red flags go up real quick.

There is also the technique for locating "stealthy" objects. If you are looking where there should be something and there is nothing, something is there with rather interesting properties. For reference, think of the situation where stars should be visible.

Re:Lay off the Chinese!

[turing_m]

"When I passed the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany." - Jesse Owens

"Hitler didn't snub me--it was FDR who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram." - Jesse Owens