Space Spotters Track Secret Satellites

Ponca City, We Love You writes "When government officials announced last month that a top-secret spy satellite would come falling out of the sky they said little about the satellite itself. They didn't need to. Spotters equipped with little more than a pair of binoculars, a stop watch and star charts, had already uncovered some of the deepest of the government's expensive secrets and shared them on the Internet. Thousands of people form the spotter community. Many look for historical relics of the early space age, working from publicly available orbital information. Still others are drawn to the secretive world of spy satellites, with about a dozen hobbyists doing most of the observing. When a new spy satellite is launched the hobbyists will collaborate on sightings around the world to determine its orbit, and even guess at its function. They often share their information on their web site, satobs.org."

New features to block observation.

[BWJones]

It is actually getting harder to identify satellites due to the efforts that certain governments are taking, including building in additional propulsion and stealth features built into the latest launches to alter and conceal orbits from those that might be predicted from launch. This is to prevent not only the ability to track orbits and know when a particular platform may be overhead, but it also prevents many of the current technologies like adaptive optics from being able to identify features of orbiting satellites as shown here [utah.edu] .

This is news?

[rmadmin]

If you look at the satobs site, it hasn't been updated since 2004. WTF?

real time tracking data on USA-193

[Bazzargh]

The links in TFA aren't very good - theres a site
here [n2yo.com] that does real time sat tracking (ooh, animated over google maps).

I looked there last week and they didn't have enough data to show the orbit but it seems they have some elements now.

Big machines in space, you bet.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm [rense.com]

Re:New features to block observation.

[TubeSteak]

It is actually getting harder to identify satellites due to the efforts that certain governments are taking, including building in additional propulsion and stealth features built into the latest launches to alter and conceal orbits from those that might be predicted from launch.

The only people this will hide anything from are civilians and countries that haven't made any serious effort to track satellites.

I recall a dustup between the US & France where the US has been publishing orbits of foreign military satellites and French spotted a whole bunch of satellites that the USA was pretending didn't exist. The French said "take our satellites out of the catalog or we'll publish what we've found". Here's one article discussing the matter [space.com]

I only bring this up to support my assertion that any government with time and money can track satellites.

Good Web Site

[Old VMS Junkie]

I'm a big fan of Heavens Above, http://www.heavens-above.com/ [heavens-above.com]

Re:New features to block observation.

[mrxak]

Of course people know where these satellites are. Between radar and simple telescopes, they are easy to see and compare to lists of known objects. One of the main reasons the Predator and other drones are effective at finding terrorists and the like out in the mountains or desert is because the terrorists know when our satellites are going overhead. They hide when the satellites goes over, and move when the sky is clear overhead, which is when we send out our drones. It's a constant struggle to keep our satellites' orbits changing so the people we want to spy on get caught.

Re:New features to block observation.

[Mr2cents]

Indeed, spy sats have orbits only a few 100km high. Geosynchonous orbit is 36.000km. Much too far for closeup images.

Re:What one seeks to hide, another can uncover

[Dusty101]

This is exactly what the alien invaders did in one episode of the old "U.F.O." T.V. series: http://ufoseries.com/ [ufoseries.com]

Re:Paint it black?

[Anonymous Coward]

At the risk that this might (not) be a genuine question - because anything black gets awfully hot in space (solar heating, and no way to shed it again other than radiating it). A vacuum is a wonderful thermal insulation, which is why one of the biggest conceptual problems for all spacecraft (and suits) is to get rid of the heat they inevitably generate additionally to what they pick up from the sun, counterintuitive to the public misconception of space being "cold". And still you probably couldn't paint it black enough that it would disappear in front of the as-black-as-it-gets backdrop that is the blackness of space itself. No, if you want to hide something visually in space, you need a mirror, because at the proper angle it would show you nothing but that blackness.

Baloney. Re:Nuke Fallout

[EQ]

Doc, you need to subscribe to some technical literature instead of the nuclear paranoia you seem to subscribe to. This situation is pretty obvious if you bother to think instead of knee-jkerk react. You seem to start with the pre-judeged assumption that some sort of comic-book conspiracy of evil overlords runs the US Intelligence agencies and will irrationally choose evil nukes over engineering practicality, in order to be more menacing.

Wrong. Be rational. There are solid engineering and budgetary reasons at work here. No "secrecy" can hide those issues, no matter the classification fo the satellite. Physics, like mathematics, sooner or later breaks attempts at classifying it. And there are limits on the money spent, even in a "black" budget project. If things go bad, you can bet overspending will leak out. Google SBIRS-High for a good example - look at the globalsecurity.org entry (pic is taken looking S from Buckley AFB - I used to live to the west of that hill full of houses in Aurora CO).

The weight and expense to power ratio for plutonium or other decay based power systems is too high compared to solar arrays and batteries when in low earth orbit. The stuff that uses nukes is generally interplanetary in nature and cannot depend on solar. This is especially true with US launched stuff. Plus, nuclear power units have too high a heat signature to be used for "stealthy" sats, and are heavy and too expensive to launch if there is a cost-worthy alternative. Which there is: good ol' solar arrays, nice and thin.

The intelligence agencies would much rather have more gizmos if given the choice. Solar arrays provide them with better weight tradeoffs, and more power as well -- meaning they can add more stuff and use more power hungry stuff. And they are cheaper to deploy, and less likely to run afoul of regulatory issues i.e. try dragging a nuc design for LOE (low earth orbit) in front of an Engineering Design Review board - they'll laugh you out of the room for being politically stupid.

And if you are talking about the voiced concerns that the satellite in question (US-193, NROL-21) has hazardous material, well that hazmat is rocket fuel for orbital manuvering - the full load of it given that the sat never deployed the solar arrays, nor attemted to manuver to a more stable higher orbit. Chemicals. Not nukes.

Re:This is news?

[rholland356]

Yep, the information would be highly useful to terrorists - they could probably shoot down the satellites with their AKs!

If someone were conducting a war against you, and you knew they used satellite imaging to track your movements, and you knew the timing of the satellites over your turf, I think you could come up with some effective strategies for creating disinformation, or avoiding detection.

You know, so you could aim your AKs at ground targets with less risk to you and greater harm to the target.

And, given that it is nigh-impossible to change a satellite's orbit after launch, you could benefit today from information gleaned in 2004.

I'm just sayin'...

Re:This is news?

[somersault]

Not impossible if it has thrusters (as mentioned in the first post I think it was?). The satellites are also only really useful when you know what you're looking for. A small terrorist cell doesn't have to operate out in the open or in a fixed base, they could be a bunch of people that met online (maybe not that likely, but possible) and have yet to even meet irl.

Re:What one seeks to hide, another can uncover

[Jarjarthejedi]

As opposed to the hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of space junk that are already passing over their country.

There's a lot of junk up there in pretty regular orbits. Most of it's not low enough for a standard spy satellite but it's not like space is a pristine clean area where only designated satellites are flying around and there's nothing else up there...