Superpowers pretend various space assets are secrets, but it's really a pointless waste of their secrecy machines. If the amateurs know this much about everyone's satellite position and appearance, the pros certainly know much more. So who's left? Nobody. So it's only secret on paper.
There is tremendous value in knowing the orbits and when they pass over as India demonstrated in 1998 by using awareness of US spy satellite overpasses to keep their preparations secret. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokhran-II
This is fascinating. From an original source in that article:
> The Regiment 58 Engineers had learned a lot since 1995 about how to avoid detection by U.S. spy satellites. A lot of work was done at night, and heavy equipment was always returned to the same parking spot at dawn so that image analysts would conclude that they had never moved. Piles of sand were shaped to mimic the wind-aligned and shaped dune forms in the area. When cables were laid they were carefully covered and native vegetation replaced to conceal the digging.
The problem with counter-surveillance is you take a risk doing it. Maybe your technique works, maybe you've got an advantage...but you don't know. And if it doesn't work, a good adversary will also not take immediate action either.
I assume constant imagery of most areas. We are probably all tracked in great detail but they would not want us to know that. I suspect they already can retrace the steps of any crime and follow it backwards. But they are not worried about crimes but probably are tracking certain people and don’t want them to wise up and deploy anti satellite tracking techniques. Spy vs spy.
This is actually something that can be pretty safely ruled out. Spy satellites like this are placed at very low orbits, which allows them to get very high resolution images. At these low orbits, the satellites are moving incredibly fast relative to the ground. They're circling the earth in 1 to 2 hours. This is advantageous since the same satellite can be used to observe different areas and with minimal maneuvering can make passes over a much wider area than they could see in a single orbit, and even follow slow moving targets like fleets of ships or army columns, but it also means that they are only observing any particular place on earth for a very brief interval with substantial periods of time in between. While you could see the timelapse of say a building being constructed, they can't make high resolution videos of things that take more than a few seconds and less than several hours. To get continuous imaging in a particular spot, you need to utilize a very different orbit that will take the satellite much further away from Earth, which ruins the resolution of any imaging. While the exact resolution of a given satellite is classified, the laws of physics put upper bounds on how good an image they can possibly get. Any satellite that could track and record a specific individual for an extended period of time would be way too large to launch.
Not all surveillance is satellite based. There are radar systems and sufficiently high-resolution camera systems that make it possible to surveil entire cities and later play the footage back.
Such a system was in use during the Kenosha protests, by the FBI.
In my city people routinely notice planes appearing on ADS-B services circling an area for hours, the tail number traces back to some shell company, and airliners.net photos show a plane with a clear-as-day surveillance package attached to it.
Moreover, just as you can stitch images together in space, you can stitch them together in time if you have multiple satellites, drones, dirigibles, etc. covering the same area at different times.
Spying can be detailed or not so detailed. Here's the link that shows exactly how things can be traced backwards. Albeit, this is with a plane but with enough satellites, it's entirely possible.
This is podcast is an advertisement by a man who is actively selling his technology to the US government. It's about as reliable as a founder seeking seed capital for their new AI product.
Capabilities and data can be inferred as well. If you know exactly what something is flying over, who launched it and when, you can make some reasonable assumptions.
- An anti-satellite weapon not unlike the rockets the Chinese launch at satellites, but more refined and capable of retrieving technology before disabling the craft.
- A testing platform for space technology like sensors. It can serve as a makeshift scrappy satellite if you need to quickly deploy a sensor for something.
Like you don't know what it's doing but you know what mostly everything else on space that was not launched on board of that thing is doing so there's not much left to imagination here. It's like saying you don't know what Delta Force is doing, yeah you do, they shoot at people. You don't know what people and for what reason but that's not spooky secret alien stuff or anything.
If the X-37 has anti-satellite capabilities, it's probably nothing like the Chinese ASATs. Satellites are very fragile, and it would be very easy to disable one by punching a hole in a heat-shield or cooling system. The X-37 could also place small sabotage tools on or near adversary satellites, for future activation in the event of a conflict.
The proposed model and the photograph were made independently by different people by the way.
Solar panels aren't included at all in the proposed model. These are the protrusions towards the bottom left and top right on the photograph. The part at the "upper left" end of the satellite might just be a lid or a sunshade on the opening of the telescope. Beside that the tapering shape of the main structure looks similar, imo. Keep in mind that there is a wide variety of possible shapes for satellites. For that, the proposed shape doesn't look that bad, imo.
So, if it's true that these KH-12 spy satellites are basically modified versions the Hubble space telescope, would it be reasonable to assume that Webb will get copied in a similar way for spy satellites?
Yes, the spy satellites were first by a long shot. The KH-11 (2.4m mirror, CCD focal plane) was first launched in 1976. Hubble (2.4m mirror, CCD focal plane) was launched in 1990.
The space shuttle was funded and designed to meet Department of Defense specifications. Its cargo bay designed to ferry satellites up and to potentially return them back to earth.
Keyhole satellites were seriously cool. Photos were taken on film, and the film reels were jettisoned over the ocean. C-130 transports would capture the payloads as they parachuted back to earth:
Doubtful, I think Webb only sees in the infrared. Looking at the earth would blind it. This is why it'll be a million miles away protected by a fancy heat shield.
Wouldn't that depend on how much dynamic range it has? Webb is intended to look at very dim signals in space so Earth would blind it, but if a spy-Webb were intended to track rocket or jet engines, things quite hotter than the rest of earth, perhaps it might be capable of that?
