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

[IndustrialComplex]

That doesn't mean that a lot of them are not easily tracked even by amateur astronomers. It is tricky to make something that can see you, but you not be able to see it.

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

[AndrewNeo]

Paint it black?

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

[Gordonjcp]

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.

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

[Pugwash69]

If there's any black holes in orbit, we have more important problems than a little debris.

Re:Confused

[jank1887]

we should put a black hole in orbit to take care of the debris. we can name it Hoover.

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

[adam.dorsey]

Then there would be a black hole with the mass of a sattelite on/inside/passing straight through the Earth. Can you stand beside a satellite without being "sucked in" by gravity? It's the same mass, just in a really small space. Its gravity gets no stronger as a black hole than the gravity as a satellite.

Re:Confused

[jank1887]

That's no moon...

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

[Zenaku]

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.

Re:Confused

[Digital End]

A black hole small enough to 'orbit' earth would be to small to maintain itself.

Mass trys NOT to collapse into a black hole... that's why things that aren't big enough (like our sun) won't be black holes. You have to get FREAKISHLY high amounts of mass and insane amounts of gravity to get a baby black hole. It wouldn't orbit earth, we'd orbiit the black hole.

The mass is try to strech back out like a squashed sponge, the gravity tries to squash it. Normally the mass wins because gravity is a very very weak force... it takes a huge mass to create a real black hole... the stuff the LHC is planning are black holes because the mass is compressed enough to count them as black holes, not because they are huge gravity wells. They squash 2 atoms or whatever (probably smaller then atoms) together, and for a billionth of a billionth of a second, it's squashed enough to call a black hole, and then matter expands back out (like 2 rubber balls hitting eachother and then bouncing back). What is interesting is how they bounce off of eachother and what that tells them.

Also, this is why we laugh at people who think man made black holes from the LHC will kill us all... they really have no idea what they are talking about. Once we start taking masses the size of jupitor and the sun and running them thru the LHC, I'd be worried. I'd also be confused as to how we fit them in the LHC...

tl;dr - Gravity is very weak, matter wants to have room to strech out. It takes a lot of matter to make a black hole, more then our sun. There are not tiny black holes that last more then theoretical times because they can't stay squashed.

AGI in Exton, PA

[IndustrialComplex]

From what I hear, it's a pretty nice company to work for. Too nice in fact. The guy who was my Best Man at my wedding works there. You guys really need to let him out more. He likes it too much, and his family and friends miss him.

Err, not just Google Earth.

[apathy maybe]

According to the Wikipedia article on Keyhole Markup Language, the following apps can read and understand it:

        * ArcGIS Explorer
        * Feature Manipulation Engine (FME)
        * Flickr
        * Google Earth
        * Google Maps
        * Google Mobile
        * Live Search Maps
        * Microsoft Virtual Earth
        * Map My Ancestors
        * Mapufacture
        * Marble (KDE)
        * OpenLayers
        * Platial
        * RouteBuddy for Mac
        * WikiMapia
        * World Wind
        * Yahoo Pipes
        * SuperMap iServer (SuperMap IS) .NET and Java
        * OpenLAPI, an LGPL implementation of the Location API for Java ME

So, for those of you who don't have, or don't want to use, or can't use Google Earth, there are plenty of other options available.

But yes, it's pretty cool what you can do hey.

Re:Err, not just Google Earth.

[brunes69]

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.

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.

Re:xplanet?

[Tangent128]

Err... it already does that- under "Weather", there are checkboxes for cloud cover (worldwide) and radar (limited to U.S & Europe).

I'm looking at Hanna, Ike, that splotch that may become something, and Josephine right now, and can see Gustav's remains in Canada. Pretty cool.

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.

j-track 3d

[KatTran]

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.

Re:j-track 3d

[Suddenly_Dead]

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.

Google Earth originated with Keyhole, Inc. (who was bought by Google), not NASA. Keyhole's Earth Viewer (which is now Google Earth) seems to have been first released in 2001; Worldwind's first release was in 2004.

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

[ledow]

I think you'll find that your information is a little out of date and mainly applies to older military satellites.

Anything "critical" wold be done with a better satellite or a cloud of smaller satellites that are impossible to "avoid". For instance, GPS demands that at least four satellites are in view at all times from every part of the globe to get an accurate fix. Satellites which are, on the whole, run, controlled or have interests from the US Government. I'm not saying that the GPS system is for primarily military "spying" purposes, but it shows that even the public satellite orbits are enough to basically see anything, anywhere, given the most basic of manoeuvring capability.

What makes you think that all of the "unheard of" satellites are any different, or in fewer numbers, or not able to move to look at anything interesting within a reasonable timeframe? It would be quite pointless, after all, to launch a modern multi-billion dollar military satellite if all that was required was public information / academic data gathered from worldwide telescopes to render them completely useless.

Even easier would be to, oh, I don't know, do things at night (yes, IR-capable satellites exist but it makes things harder straight away)? Or do things in large warehouses with a roof?

Re:Spy Satellites

[nedlohs]

GPS satellites orbit at around 20200km., Spy satellites (of the take pictures variety - some other types are in geosynchronous orbit, SBIRS and Rhyolite for example) orbit at around 200km (sometime under 100km, sometimes 600km - there's the obvious detail/area trade off).

GSP just requires line of sight. Spy satellite cameras point in some direction.

Claiming there is any relationship at all between having 4 GPS sats in view at any time and what spy satellites are capable of is ridiculous.

'Nod' tag

[Spatial]

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

Re:'Nod' tag

[Danny Rathjens]

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.

Misleading?

[blantonl]

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? ;-)

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.

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.

Apostrophe's...

[Dan Parker]

...and they're use's.