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."

Re:What one seeks to hide, another can uncover

[KublaiKhan]

Which is what would make a discarded upper stage ideal--because you would expect it to be in a lower orbit than the satellite that it pushed out. Blow off a couple side panels, stabilize the tumble into something useful, and you're in with flynn.

Re:New features to block observation.

[BWJones]

You don't know how right you are... I just finished visiting a certain location, taking photos and writing for an article on UAV operations. The experience was truly amazing with operations that would have been absolutely impossible just a few years ago being done on a daily basis.

Re:Government for you.

[32771]

Well most developed nations could develop radar installations to track space junk and their own satellites.

(I just wanted to know about the object size one can track and found some interesting paper:
http://www.esa.int/esapub/bulletin/bullet109/chapter16_bul109.pdf [esa.int])

Also consider the Chinese anti missile test some months ago, the Chinese should also be able to track their
space junk if this experiment was to be meaningful.

The problem is though that even lesser developed Nations without their own space program have the need to protect
their defense installations. Even though their means might be limited they certainly can do damage to an attacker
within range of their defenses. So even they want to detect the prying eyes in the sky.

What they probably don't have is the same number of guys with a telescope, spare time, and the education to hunt
for satellites and even guess their purpose. Combined with a distribution medium like the internet for collaboration
and collection of information that a bunch of amateurs would have come up with easily, this would become a valuable
source of information to those lesser developed nations. This would only cost you an internet connection and an OLPC.

Re:real time tracking data on USA-193

[StarfishOne]

Heavens Above is also wonderful for predicting so-called Iridium flares [wikipedia.org]. These are bright flashes of light caused by the satellite in question reflecting the light of the Sun. These can reach a magnitude of -8 and -9... can be very spectatular to see. A bit like a small lighthouse in the sky. :)

If you're really enthusiastic, you can build your own laser [fbrtech.com] to point to the correct spot in the sky! ;)

And if you want to be up to date all the time, why not download the OSX Iridium Flare Dashboard widget [dashboardwidgets.com]? :D

Happy flare spotting!

Re:What one seeks to hide, another can uncover

[KublaiKhan]

All orbits are regular--and one could always fake an accident with the thruster at the end "pushing it into an unexpected orbit"

And not all the tumble would need to be removed--just set it into a tumble that would allow the cameras or other instruments on board to record properly, on an axis around the camera lens, say.

Hell, I'm surprised they haven't done something like that already.

Spy Satellites and Space Shuttle Crossrange

[bitrex]

An interesting fact I learned listening to some of the MIT lectures available online about the history and development of the Shuttle: One of the military requirements of the Shuttle was that it had at least 1400 miles crossrange. This was so for example, in a time of crisis (the shuttle was designed during the Cold War after all), the Shuttle could be launched from Vandenberg AFB into a polar orbit, immediately drop a spy satellite into orbit on the first go around (to prevent an enemy from learning the projected orbital path of the spy satellite by tracking the shuttle through multiple orbits), and then come right back to land on the west coast. Of course the earth would have rotated eastwards during that 90 minute orbit, so the shuttle needed the crossrange to be able to also glide eastwards and make a landing. Some original designs showed the shuttle having straight wings; apparently one of the major reasons NASA went with a delta-wing configuration was to meet the crossrange requirement.

Re:Paint it black? / RF downlinks.

[uhfsatcom]

HI, Quite interesting re painting satellites black. If you look at some of the photos of the recent 'wideband gapfiller satellite', the satellite bus is mostly black. http://www.boeing.com/ids/news/2006/q3/060926b_pr.html [boeing.com] has a picture of the satellite in a frame prior to testing. If you look at it, you can see all the communications antennas are black. I'm not sure is this is painted for stealth reasons, or the antennas are made of carbon fiber. I'm sure this is only one example of many recent satellites that have been painted black.Either way, painting a satellite would only solve a small amount of the problem, since pretty much all satellites carry an RF payload which transmits data back to earth, they can be detected this way if they cannot be seen. The article mentions the 'seesat' group which does visual obs, but a parallel group 'hearsat' works with the RF downlinks, identifying satellites purely by their RF fingerprints. In fact several satellites have been detected at RF, orbits computed which were then passed on to the 'seesat' folks for visual confirmation. There are a few sites that you can check out if you are interested in the RF Aspects of satellite detection, www.hearsat.org, www.satellitenwelt.de and www.uhf-satcom.com being just a few.