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."

Comments

Confused

[MyLongNickName]

The title says "every", the summary says 13,000 objects. Is this really complete, or are there objects that are not tracked (or at least not disclosed)?

Re:Confused

[hoofinasia]

Of course, whenever the seller / developer presents software, the language gets a tad stronger. "Every" might not be "all."

However, given the recent interest in commercialized space travel / exploration, it would be in the USStratCom (US Strategic Command)'s best interest to keep X-Prize's rockets off their damn satellites. So I'm guessing the list is pretty comprehensive.

Re:Confused

[oneiros27]

Besides the conspiracy side of things, there are number of objects that are just simply too small to track. So when satellites have been shot down, or an astronaut drops a bolt, it's out there, but it might not be tracked. The last number I heard was 110k objects over 1cm ... and that number's 8 years old.

Re:Confused

[v1]

they're usually given away by the glint of sun off their solar panels. you can find information on most of the "secret" satellites with google, they've pretty much all been located by the amateur astronomy community. Some even have pictures of them. Probably really gets some NSA types blood boiling.

Re:Confused

[Lincolnshire Poacher]

Plus, they have to be lofted in public view and there is an entire art to determining their missions based on their project patches:

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1033/1

Re:Confused

[Jason Levine]

Of course you can. Remember, orbiting is the state of constantly falling towards an object (in this case Earth), but always missing the ground. So the bolt is dropped, falls, and misses the ground over and over. At least until it hits into something else, shoots out into space (unlikely), and/or lowers orbit enough to burn up in the atmosphere.

Re:Confused

[fabs64]

It's a solid object. As it stands that assures that it will either absorb, reflect or diffract all electromagnetic radiation that hits it with a wavelength less than its size. All three of those things are detectable.

At the moment it's more of a drm(hiders) vs hackers(finders) situation.

Re:Confused

[Zenaku]

I am not a physicist, and am speculating. But I imagine that a black hole of such a small mass would have an event horizon so small that it could fall all the way through the earth without even striking the nucleus of a single atom. It wouldn't "pull in" much of anything -- besides having very little mass itself, at scales that small the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces between atoms are all far more significant than gravity.

Basically, it would only gain mass when through happenstance a subatomic particle happened to cross its event horizon, and while that would mean that eventually the black hole would grow large enough to matter, the infrequency of it gaining any mass and the insignificance of the mass gained each time would mean that it will still be imperceptible to us long after the sun burns out or goes nova.

Re:Confused

[lifejunkie]

You have a set of one time use authentication keys on the satellite. The first x bytes of your new firmware image must match the current key or you ignore the image and go silent for a known amount of time.

xplanet?

[Speare]

It seems like every couple months, Google Earth gains another feature that's been working for months or years in the X Planet program. Day/Night artwork, Satellite ephemeris, etc. I'm still waiting for cloud layer updates and I don't think there's a solar or lunar locator on it yet. The interactive nature of Google Earth is nicer than the command-line static image output of X Planet. The author of X Planet had a private script that would take three 120-degree views of radar-measured cloud data from various weather services and stitch them into a single spherical projection to be used in the graphics. He'd update it every 3 hours or so, and host the stitched version. I'm sure Google could arrange a similar process and host the image data in such a way as not to hammer the original servers nor the X Planet server.

And also....

[AnswerIs42]

You can use WWJava and JSatTrack

And NASA's J-Track

There is also a plug-in for WorldWind.net.. but that is only 400 objects.. though it could be easily tweaked to show the 13,000 list as well I am sure.

Spy Satellites

[Mechanik]

So how long before this can be used to determine when spy satellites are/are not overhead and able to observe you? I would assume that with some basic armchair assumptions about the FOV and zoom capabilities of the satellites' cameras, one could project a cone onto a model representing the surface of the earth and determine the viewable area to each satellite (the existence of which and orbits of which are generally known by satellite buffs).

I've long wondered if something like this is already available to foreign intelligence operatives... it's long been said that say the Russians know exactly when US spy satellites are due to be overhead, and change their behaviour and camouflage anything they don't want seen in time for when the satellites pass overhead.

It raises some interesting issues with respect to national security, the war on drugs/terror/etc. However, given it's all based on public knowledge and you can't exactly outlaw math, I fail to see what the government could do about it.

Re:Spy Satellites

[digitalchinky]

There are so many overhead assets that all the responses above are accurate. In this day and age if you want something to stay hidden, you keep it under wraps. Not just any kind of wraps though. Floating above are devices that can look at pretty much any part of the spectrum, along with active systems such as synthetic aperture RADAR. RADAR is quite cool, it can even peek through various layers and see what's underneath to a limited extent.

Here are some RADAR images.
http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/radar.htm

There is a lot of interesting stuff on fas.org that would have (and probably still would) see me thrown in jail were I to ever make such info accessible on line. I'm not sure how they get away with it.

--
Ex 3 letter agency drone.

'Nod' tag

[Spatial]

What? I don't get it. Should we call in the GDI, or is this yet another useless meme tag?

Did someone think about clean up?

[kai6novice]

I think some companies should just go clean up all the retired/inactive/disfunctional satellites or junk and recycle it! ;)

Wow.

[arcsimm]

It was certainly a shocker when Google Earth loaded up the satellite data. I knew there was a lot of crap up there, but damn!

If I could make one suggestion, though, should you continue to develop this: Different icons for different classes of satellite? For instance, a greyed-out icon for inactive satellites, a booster for rocket leftovers, a chunk of rock for space debris, etc... I spent about a minute wondering why there were so many weather satellites over the US until I realized that most of them were just orbiting debris.

Awesome use of Google Earth, though!

That's a disclosure, not a disclaimer

[gujo-odori]

Go ahead and mod me OT, but it's Friday and I'm just pissed off to be the last person in the universe who knows the difference between a disclosure statement and a disclaimer.

"This is a cool new toy/tool/product I'm posting on Slashdot, and by the way, I not only work at the company that produces it, I wrote it" is a disclosure.

A disclaimer typically contains language such as "Not responsible for damages resulting from use, or inability to use, this product. Not even if it burns your house, steals your car, drinks your liquor from your old fruit jar, *and* steps on your blue suede shoes."

Disclosure statements are meant to inform the reader of, for example, a potential conflict of interest, and shield the discloser from potential liability (whether legal or just in terms of face) should the disclosure not be made.

Disclaimers are basically just weasel words intended to deny having any liability for, say, the quality or lack thereof, or some product. Or put another way, disclosure is taking responsibility (to some extent, at least, and not always), whereas disclaimers are solely intended to worm out of responsibility that the you probably have, at least morally if not legally. And maybe legally. Not all disclaimers will stand up in court. I wouldn't be surprised if most won't.

Re:Misleading?

[TubeSteak]

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? ;-)

They don't.
Last year the French "negotiated" with the USA to remove "secret" French satellites from the list.
And by "negotiated" I mean "threatened to reveal unpublished USA satellites".
http://www.space.com/news/060707_graves_web.html

That isn't to say the satellites aren't trackable, they just aren't published publicly by any governments AFAIK.

Re:Pics

[Overzeetop]

Have you seen Wall-E? It's not that bad. Yet.

Black via nanorods...

[WallaceAndGromit]

Your comment made me think about this article posted a while ago about a material with the lowest reflectivity ever measured....

"the researchers deposited silica nanorods at an angle of precisely 45 degrees on top of a thin film of aluminum nitride, which is a semiconducting material used in advanced light-emitting diodes (LEDs). From the side, the films look much like the cross section of a piece of lawn turf with the blades slightly flattened."

Additional Info

[dukeofurl01]

I don't know a whole lot about satellites, and this is nice, however what would be really useful information, and this info may or may not be available, would be when you click on a satellite, what the satellite does, as well as the country of origin, declination, etc. I would kind of like to know who owns the satellite, not just what country that company is in. I kind of feel like that is giving the wrong answer in that field.