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Every Satellite Tracked In Realtime Via Google Earth
Matt Amato writes "With the recent discussion of the ISS having to dodge some space junk, many people's attention has once again focused on the amount of stuff in orbit around our planet. What many people don't know is that USSTRATCOM tracks and publishes a list of over 13,000 objects that they currently monitor, including active/retired satellites and debris. This data is meaningless to most people, but thanks to Analytical Graphics, it has now been made accessible free of charge to anyone with a copy of Google Earth. By grabbing the KMZ, you can not only view all objects tracked in real-time, but you can also click on them to get more information on the specific satellite, including viewing its orbit trajectory. It's an excellent educational tool for the space-curious. Disclaimer: I not only work for Analytical Graphics, but I'm the one that wrote this tool as a demo."
I would think it highly likely that there are certain objects in space that the United States Strategic Command would prefer not to talk about.
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Every military satellite launched, not just by the US but by *anyone* can be tracked. Even gpredict has keps for US military stuff. You can track it, you can often see it with the naked eye, and you certainly can receive signals from them. Decoding the signals is harder, but with fairly modest equipment you can certainly hear that they are there.
The subject sums it up, but I'm getting a little pissed at technology that is developed at NASA (World Wind) is just getting co-opted by Google (Google Earth) with no respect paid to the initial innovators.
J-Track 3D has been around for years doing this exact same function of plotting satellite trajectories including ground trace and additional information if you click on the satellite.
Just because you do it using Google doesn't mean that it's new, cool, innovative or news worthy.
http://science.nasa.gov/Realtime/jtrack/3d/JTrack3d.html
There is also J-Track which on Windows, with its "active desktop" feature, can be set as your background/wallpaper to always be tracking weather and satellites.
Most of those products are limited to the surface. Google Earth is one of the only ones that also has a space view and a Z axis. So, this particular KML would be of limited usefulness to most of them. For example even Google maps, I have no idea what it would do with this KML.
Alas any material designed to absorb radiation would absorb too much energy and probably be damaged. It would also be detectable because it would be a 'hole in space' or a region of space with a sharp dip in background electromagnetic radiation.
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I think the story might be a little misleading.
I suspect that not every object's info is made available, rather only the objects that USSTRATCOM deems appropriate for public consumption. Spy Sats, classified objects, and other items that they classify as not appropriate certainly doesn't show up in this KML.
Or do they? ;-)
Lindsay Blanton
RadioReference.com
Some things are just difficult to hide in this manner, not to mention expensive. Yes, there is a history of say, the Soviets building nuclear submarines in caves and whatnot to avoid overhead surveillance, but the bigger something is, the harder it is to hide in such a way that you can keep working on it while it's hidden. It's going to look a bit odd when all those cement trucks that are pouring the foundation for an ICBM site keep going into a supposedly finished warehouse in the middle of Buttfuck, Siberia where there's nothing around for 100 miles. The intelligence analysts are still going to know you're up to something.
Construction in the dark is a pain in the ass as well. You'd have to light everything so that the workers can see what the hell they are doing, so in effect much of it would be visible anyway. Outfitting every worker with night vision goggles is not typically cost effective I would think.
You can't make it any more black. You just can't. You look at this, and I ask you, how much more black can it get? The answer is none. None more black.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
I know, it's a wow kind of thing.
But if you think about it a bit, an orbital path can be described by a very few numbers-- the angles to the equator and to Greenwich, and the minor and major radii. All else can be computed on the fly by about 8 lines of code.
Okay, but as it sucks in the atmosphere, wouldn't it get more massive? And would it not continue to pull in more and more mass as time went on? Or am I missing something?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Oh, and this is all ignoring the possibility that a black hole that small would simply dissipate via Hawking radiation within a second of coming into being.
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Just someone abusing the system, obviously. Too bad I can't use my mod points on the tags. :)
Maybe we should make it so that the masses can cancel a stupid tag by using the negated tag, e.g. if there are several "nod" tags and several people make "!nod" tags it would be a wash and neither displayed.