Satellite Spotters Make Government Uneasy

An anonymous reader found an interesting little story about satellite spotters and how, not surprisingly, their painstakingly methodical hobby doesn't exactly make gazillion dollar government agencies all that excited. Of course the article raises the very obvious point that if a guy with a pair of binoculars in his back yard can spot a satellite, so can the Chinese government.

well

[someone1234]

If they are spotted, they failed. I think they should thank the spotters for the free bugtesting.

Sorry, governments...

[TripMaster Monkey]

...but the sky is pretty much Public Domain. Or are you going to outlaw looking up?

Re:well

[morgan_greywolf]

Um, maybe I'm missing something obvious here, but if you have an object in low Earth orbit, it would seem to me that as long as there is line of sight to it, there's no way you can really hide it.

What's this new obsession with the Chinese...

[kaos07]

Seriously, two articles in the same day scaremongering about China. Slashdot is turning into The New York Times in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

If the Chinese can develop tiny robots good for them. If the Chinese can spot satellites, good for them. Why the summary decided to single out China, I don't know. I'm sure if a guy with binoculars can do it, so can just about every government in the world, including the United States government. Remember, you guys aren't the only with satellites up these days.

First of all we aren't all American here so we don't all quite understand this paranoia about the Chinese. Secondly, I highly doubt the average Slashdotter, who is generally well educated, has the kind of irrational paranoia that Slashdot seems to be provoking in these articles.

GOOD!!

[krygny]

The people charged with our defense and national security are *supposed* to be uneasy, ...lay awake nights, ... constantly wonder if all they've done is enough. That way, the rest of us don't have to.

Many LEO satellites are visible to the naked eye, and certainly with only a little optical assistance. Spotting one and speculating what it's doing are two different things. But maybe it's time to employ a little stealth for satellites too.

They Already Know

[Anonymous Coward]

The US government isn't worried about China or vice versa. We both know where each other's satellites are; both public and "secret". You don't put two billion dollar objects in orbit on a potential crash course. It just doesn't happen. That's why they know, we know they know, they know we know they know, and we're all comfortable with that.

Next question?

Re:Stealth Satellites?

[TripMaster Monkey]

All the government folks are saying is that they would rather not have folks doing the work for the Chinese government.

That's not what the article said. The article said that if hobbyists could do it, so could the Chinese government. I doubt very much that the Chinese government is relying upon hobbyists to spot our satellites, given how easy it can be done.

Talk about a Straw Man argument. Sheesh.

Re:German scientists discovered...

[TheMeuge]

... a revolutionary, new method of self-destructing secret, space-based satellites. The new method is called overheating, due to a black, dull color.

Re:well

[phil reed]

Black absorbs sunlight. The satellite would overheat.

Re:Why China?

[Scrameustache]

When did China become "The Enemy"? I thought you were still working on Al-Qaeda. Did I miss a memo?

America has always been at war with China.
Good news about our increased chocolate rations, though!

Re:well

[maxume]

If I did have a way to hide satellites, I would make damn sure that I had some satellites that weren't hidden, and I would publicly complain about the fact that people were tracking them.

Nothing like a little misdirection in the morning.

(That the Allies sent spotter planes out to get spotted by the enemy that they had located by intercepting and decrypting message traffic, and gave the enemy time to radio home that they had been spotted, is one of my favorite things, ever.)

Re:Stealth Satellites?

[badfish99]

Actually, no: anyone making notes about who is going in and out of a government building is likely to be arrested as a terrorist (see, for example, here [texashomel...curity.com]).
The government would stop you looking at satellites too, if they could. At the moment, they can't. But if I lived in the US, I would think twice about publishing that sort of stuff on a web site.

What enemy??

[pembo13]

Is the whole rest of the world enemy to the US now?

Re:China is not the issue.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is information who's revelation could lead to death and it should be treated with serious discretion.

Bollocks. Any terror-sponsoring state has sufficient resources (guys with binoculars and some math skills) to track our satellites. As far as the poor schleps that are desperate or dumb enough to strap TNT to their chests and blow themselves and everyone around them to hell, do you really think they're bothered by getting their picture taken from 200 miles up? Until we get space lasers that can zap a "suspicious-looking" person wearing a heavy coat from LEO, I'd say they have nothing to fear from our satellites.

Oceana has always been at war with EastAsia

[billstewart]

It's there to take our minds off the war with Islam?

It's also there because high-tech secrecy is something that only matters if you've got a high-tech enemy, and Russia's really not that relevant a threat these days. So if you're in the business of high-tech paranoia, the Chinese are the only other superpower around.

Re:What's this new obsession with the Chinese...

[thefirelane]

China is one of the few contries that have a military that can take ours
You had me until there... you realize we, no joke, have more nukes in a single submarine than they do in their entire military.

I'm not saying they'll never be at that point, hell that point might even be soon... but in an all out war no one can come close to the US.

Re:well

[gnick]

Also, Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.

My speculation is that, if you were to refer to the average Chinese person as an "Asian-American", he would be confused at a minimum and possibly upset.

Re:China is not the issue.

[msuarezalvarez]

What will $CURRENT_SCARY_SMALL_TERRORIST_GROUP possibly do with this information, prey tell?

Re:well

[dotancohen]

Paint it black

And how would the satellite dissipate all the heat that it would absorb? Arm chair spy-satellite engineering might be fun, but trust me, you are not going to come up with something so obvious such as "paint it black" that the _real_ engineers did not think of first.

Re:WARNING:

[toxcspdrmn]

Do NOT look through binoculars^W telescope at secret government laser satellite with remaining eye.

Re:well

[phil reed]

Think about it. The black side will still be absorbing sunlight. Half the orbit the black paint will still be facing the sun, unless it's exactly in the earth's shadow.

Besides, that only slows (doesn't stop) down optical observation. The "enemy" can still build big radars.

Re:well

[Eternauta3k]

I don't know what spy satellites look like

A dot of light (even if you have a telescope)

Remove all blinking lights

It's actually the reflection from the Sun that lets you see it (maybe the black paint could help, along with frying the satellite and rendering the solar panels useless (unless they have a RTG)).

Re:well

[amattas]

It doesn't matter what color you paint it, you see the light reflecting off the Solar panels from the sun. There normally isn't blinking lights on these things any-who.

Re:What's this new obsession with the Chinese...

[2bitcomputers]

My friend and I recently posited that a single nuclear sub could pretty much take out most of the life on the planet. Anything that can remain submerged for 3 years under the arctic ice shelf and carries a couple of dozen ICBMs on it scares the living crap out of me.

Re:well

[besalope]

It's more along the lines of looking for objects in unpublicized flight paths that gives away spy satellites. If you're looking where there should be nothing and there's a moving object, red flags go up real quick. Now if they made dual use satellites (e.g. Weather/Spy) and publicized the flight paths, that would hide them far better. Than painting it black or changing the exterior. After all, the best place to hide things is in plain sight.

You're out of your fucking mind

[Anonymous Coward]

you realize we, no joke, have more nukes in a single submarine than they do in their entire military.

LOL, where the hell did you get that "fact"? You do realise China's been nuclear-capable since the late '60s, right?

How many nukes China does or does not have is one of the world's most closely guarded secrets and frankly, unless you're some top level NSA operative, you have no fucking idea.

The *only* credible information about the Chinese nuclear arsenal was the HK leak which emerged in 1996, which indicated China had in excess of 2,300 warheads. Look it up. That was close to an order of magnitude above any prior western media report - I somehow doubt they have given up making them since then.

They have ICBMs easily capable of reaching anywhere in the US. Accuracy doesn't really matter with nukes. If you think 2,300 nuclear warheads - and that was over *10 years ago* - isn't a significant deterrent to the US, you're out of your god damn mind.

I do not claim to have any special knowledge but I do take an interest in geopolitics and have a few friends in (Australian) intelligence circles who would laugh in your face if you tried to claim the USA would automatically win in an all out war with China. They would say, and I'm inclined to agree, that the USA is more likely to automatically *lose* anything other than for-real "all out war" with China - by default - because the US government cannot take any action which leads to nuclear retaliation by China, but the Chinese Govt couldn't give a shit. You think the US is going to risk getting nuked to save Taiwan? LOL!

Re:China is not the issue.

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Smaller groups such as certain terrorist organisations possibly do not have the organisation or patience to find out this information themselves, but they do have the ability to look up web pages.

And then what? "Look up web pages" on how to shoot them down?

I'm guessing you mean the "terrorists" can hide from them, but there are too many satellites to do that, and the amateur satellite trackers don't know accurately which ones are spy sats (the ones you have to hide from) versus other types of sats like military communications. Plus the US military mostly uses UAVs to track terrorists, and those aren't being tracked, nor fly in predictable orbits.

Rich.

Get a clue about China

[sjbe]

I think I'm responding to a troll but whatever...

China owns American hand, foot, and soul.

Oh please. Yes, China's economy is important to the US. Guess what? Works the other way too. An export economy doesn't work very well if they have no one to export to. Sure they have hundreds of billions in US debt. So what? Who are they going to sell it to? If they dump it, they would tank their own economy. They buy that debt to maintain the stability of their own currency. The best they can do is slowly diversify but they don't "own" the US any more than the US owns China. Know who the biggest US trading partner is? Hint: it's not China [census.gov]. So are you saying Canada is really who owns US?

China is not a democracy.

Neither is the US. [wikipedia.org]

China has blatant censorship and other policies that Americans hate. Americans like pretending such policies don't exist here.

I don't hear a lot of pretending in the media these days. Having personally spent time in China I can assure you there is a BIG difference in the censorship policies between the US and China. Does the US overreact on censorship sometimes? Absolutely. But I'm not going to get thrown in jail, even now, for criticizing congress or even our current sad excuse for a president unless I physically threaten someone.

China is one of the few contries that have a military that can take ours and who is not a trustworthy friend.

I think you vastly overestimate the Chinese military. Unless we plan on invading China or neighboring countries, China's force projection [wikipedia.org] capabilities are quite limited. They have no blue water navy [wikipedia.org] to speak of compared with the US so they can't really send troops a great distance. Sure they've got a large army in terms of manpower but their equipment is not widely up to date and they have no way to move said large army out of their region of the world. The only thing China has worth worrying about is nukes and they aren't insane enough to try nuking the US given the retaliation that would come. The US would be nuts to invade China but the US has no reason to want to either.

Free inquiry makes authoritarians uneasy

[dpbsmith]

Any sort of free intellectual activity, following what interests you to see where it leads, makes authoritarians uneasy. Bad governments seek to exercise power by restricting information. Anyone who's just naturally curious and follows their bliss for the sheer joy of finding things out represents a danger to authoritarians.

It's not just political speech that's dangerous, it's anything that seeks truth that might not always align with propaganda.

That's why the freedoms provided in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution are so precious.

Re:What enemy??

[z0idberg]

"You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror." - George W. (November 2001).

There are quite a few countries that aren't "with" the U.S.A. so I guess that makes them the enemies from that statement.

Now that's a high orbit

[sd.fhasldff]

However, at night time, when you're in orbit, if you're pointing towards earth, you'll be pointing towards the sun, too. Thus, if the face pointed towards earth is black, at earth night time, it'll be black-side-of-the-satellite daytime--and thus, electronics cooking time.

How high an orbit do you propose to send these (low orbit) satellites into? ;-)

Seriously, the distance between the earth and the satellite is *tiny* compared to the distance of the earth from the sun. Thus, the satellite is practically always going to be in the earth shadow when on the "night side".

Only when it's in the sunrise or sunset part of its orbit will it be exposed to the sun - and only from an oblique angle, so unless you're planning to place the satellite in a geosynchronous orbit above the Lalamatine district of Ursa Minor Beta, you shouldn't have a problem.

Re:Stealth Satellites?

[Chris Burke]

I'd rather have the Chinese or whoever have to pay for it themselves.

Yeah, binoculars being so expensive and all. Oh, and manpower! I hear that comes at a premium in China!

You're being ridiculous. The fact is that China would have already found all of these satellites some time ago; they're a big country with a big intelligence agency just like ours, they can launch satellites so if they have any interest in finding satellites -- and they certainly do -- then they would have funded their own discovery effort. No hobbiest is discovering anything that China didn't already know.

Re:well

[StikyPad]

And when it blocks out points of light behind it, commonly know as stars, then what? Oh, I know.. maybe it could just hide on the side of the earth with no people. (For the record, that will be whichever side happens to spot it first.)

Re:well

[josecanuc]

That only works for spotters who are "directly" underneath the satellite. Anyone off of the axis by which the "video camera" points at the stars would see unexpected stars.

Re:China is not the issue.

[nagora]

But most of these guys are fairly isolated and work in very small groups of other pissed of Muslims, it's far easier and more likely for them to just look this stuff up online.

And then do what? What's the security issue?

Re:You're out of your fucking mind

[darkmeridian]

Having 2,300 nuclear warheads is like having a billion people in your Army: sounds cool, but useless if you can't get them to the fight. How many ICBM's does China have? How many of those ICBMs can survive a targeted American strike? How accurate are those MIRVs? Don't get me wrong. China can hurt America with their nukes, but American can end China with their nukes. The Chinese are not going to go for the end of the world when they have the upper hand right now in terms of political and economic capital.

Re:Dupe

[Sorthum]

Maybe "whether this has ever been discussed before on Slashdot" isn't what most of us want to see the conversation devolve into?

Re:They act hostile towards us ...

[AHumbleOpinion]

Furthermore, I don't see how you can accuse China of being militarily aggressive against the United States. The spy plane issue to which you refer does not prove your case. America was flying a spy plane in sovereign Chinese territory tens of thousands of miles away from the United States. One of their fighter planes accidentally hits the plane (the pilot was a hot dog who died in the accident).

The surveillance aircraft was in international airspace, not sovereign Chinese territory, when it was intercepted by Chinese aircraft. It only entered Chinese airspace after the Chinese pilot collided with it and it had to make an emergency landing at the closest airfield.

Accidentally hit is a misnomer on your part, so is hot dog. When a high maneuverability fighter gets that close to a slow lumbering aircraft it is a threat, and when the pilots is so aggressive that he bungles the maneuver hot head would be a better description.

You other attempts at changing the topic are intentionally ignored.

Re:China is not the issue.

[kent_eh]

Smaller groups such as certain terrorist organisations possibly do not have the organisation or patience to find out this information themselves, but they do have the ability to look up web pages.

It always comes back to the terrorist bogeyman, doesn't it...

1) In the same way that there *weren't* communists under every bed during the cold war, there *aren't* terrorists lurking in every shadow today.

2) If those terrorists had the technology to affect a satellite in orbit, they probably wouldn't use it for that. They want to hit people "where they live" and freak out large parts of the population. What's going to have a "better" impact in their eyes - taking out some visible infrastructure onthe ground, or taking out a satellite that most people didn't even know existed?

Orbit follows function

[mbone]

Satellites are classified by orbits, and orbital maneuvering, more than by anything else (assuming you don't have direct knowledge of their mission). Different satellites have different orbits for a reason, to support their mission, and their orbits thus provide information about their missions. GPS satellites are in high 12 hour orbits, comm sats are in even higher, 24 hour, orbits, weather satellites are in sun-synchronous polar orbits, etc.

An example : if you have an orbit that passes over Baghdad, big deal, they all will do that sooner or later. If you have one that passes over Baghdad early to mid-morning, when the shadows are nice and long (generally regarded as the best time for surface photography), you may have something. If you have an object whose orbit is continually tweaked to keep passing over Baghdad during mid-morning every few days, and that also happens to be at the perigee of the orbit, then you almost certainly have something. If you look at where it passes over during later-afternoon on other orbits, you may start to gain insight into what other targets are of interest.

You can bet that every serious intelligence service on the planet does this. Amateurs have been doing it since the 1950's, so this is old, old news.

Re:cheap enough

[base3]

We barely whimpered as it became cheap enough for them to track us. It will be interesting to see how they react when it becomes cheap enough that we can afford to track them.

One answer (assuming they don't just outlaw it like some states outlaw radar detectors) is that they'll create fake entities to poison the data. I've thought a little bit about the "smart mob" radar trap database before, and figured all the boys in blue would sign up and mark thousands of decoy radar traps until the service was useless. One way around that attack would be subscription fees with fee waivers for information judged reliable past a certain threshold--if you launch it, let me know, so I can sign up :).