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Giant Chinese Desert Mystery Structure Solved
Velcroman1 writes "Slashdotters read Monday about strange symbols in the Gobi Desert recently imaged and indexed by Google Maps. Alien landing zones? Some military thingy? Bizarre art project? Nope. The grids of zigzagging white lines seen in two of the images — the strangest of the various desert structures — are spy satellite calibration targets, according to one NASA scientist."
So... they correspond to something on the ground they want to match, I betcha. They may have added a few lines to mask their intent, but the drawings to the west look like airfieds and I imagine the two which look like random stuff in a rectangle do match some city roads, somewhere.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
And why would these be needed. There are already many structures easily visible form space and static, so why not just use one of those?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The 'structures' are lines painted on the ground used for target practice.
Its a documented bomb range with an airport and a simulated airport to bomb as well.
If you bother to zoom out on Google Maps you can figure it out fairly quickly, oh and a few Google searchs will reveal that we've known this for years.
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Free satellite calibration provided over China
Yes, they drop bombs there.
Its a bombing range. Used to practice bomb drops by the Chinese military.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Doesn't explain why some of the structures have heavy bomb damage.
Assuming no foreign power has been bombing China- I can't fathom why China would bomb their own calibration units.
(unless it was to test what would happen- before an enemy did it to them)
Could just be for training in photo/radar interpretation for damage assessment, etc. Seems reasonable to set up a few "known" scenarios so you can train the people (or software) that will be dealing with the actual intelligence product. Probably helpful to see the results of a few known explosions when you are trying to determine how big a bomb France dropped on Libya that one time (actually, France didn't drop any ordnance on Libya; they merely surrendered it from altitude).
Thats what they want you to think. No one can stop me from imagining the most paranoid delusional scenario. It is a free country and I have the freedom to be fearful of future, gays, the 99% hippies, the mexicans. I will not be pacified, I will not be ameliorated, I will not be persuaded from using words like ameliorated, It is my time, It is my mind, and I'm gonna blow it on the most trivial stuff.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Doesn't explain why some of the structures have heavy bomb damage.
Assuming no foreign power has been bombing China- I can't fathom why China would bomb their own calibration units.
(unless it was to test what would happen- before an enemy did it to them)
Its pretty clear this is a heavily bombed area, the whole vicinity is riddled with bomb craters. Just a few clicks away from the strange lines is a
runway mock-up, with a shadow mock-up offset from it. Exploring this area you can zoom in on this target ad see what appears to b missile booster stages laying around, generally facing east-to-west. They can't be tanker trucks, because they are narrower than the nearby dirt road tracks.
Zooming out from that link shows the two mock airfields.
I'm sure all the major intelligence agencies of the world have very much better photos than these.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Here's my theory about the weird assemblage of lines and angles.
They are to test the people tasked with interpreting imagery from spy satellites -- not the optics of the satellites themselves.
Here's how it would work:
1. The powers-that-be paint lines of varying lengths intersecting at varying angles, and over a non-flat surface (note the evidence of water drainage over some of the lines).
2. They use their spy satellites to capture imagery of the lines at various distances and elevations.
3. Their interpreters use these images to reconstruct the lengths/angles of the various lines.
4. The powers-that-be check the interpreters' reconstructions with what they know was actually painted on ground.
5. The interpreters learn how to accurately reconstruct measurements from spy satellite imagery, and thereby gain knowledge of what other countries are doing.
6. Profit! (or something) :-)
GPS is now so heavily used by so many segments of the civilian world that no nation can afford its loss unless it was about to be annihilated. The more precise signals can be re-encrypted, as they were for a long time, but the basic signal is too ingrained for the US to completely shut down GPS (or remove all access to it).
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Are you sure they are Chinese bombs? Perhaps they are UFO crash landings?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
you never repurposed anything? Perhaps the area once was a bomb range (cold war era perhaps) and they have repurposed these vast tracts of government owned land into satellite calibration areas. Hell, look at this:
http://g.co/maps/39mhb
That is near where i live. On google earth it looks like an air base mockup. from the ground, you can't even see the thing. That *was* an air base about 50 years ago. Now its a few foundations and a crumbling runway. Things look a lot different from above.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
A big chunk of the US war machine is GPS driven, and if you have a capability to operate without GPS and still hit your targets then you have an advantage.
That's a big "if". Much of the US military uses GPS, but is capable of falling back to more traditional methods. The Chinese military is likely to be just as reliant on GPS, and just as able to utilise fall backs.
The advantage of destroying GPS would probably be relatively minimal, but the disruption it'd cause to civilian operation (including in China) would be huge.