"One day the magic was finally gone. There was no more wonder. What before would make you question what sit beyond the veil, and its impossibility in a linear universe, no longer did. Everything was catalogued, every inch of soil, wrinkles around the corners of your mouth, the reflection on your iris when you were happy, or sad, circumstances you found yourself in. All of that had a rational thread that could be followed back to the big silent eye, data point by data point. There was nothing else to question, no possibility of impossibles, of something unseen. Just this never ending stream of letters that told you that's all there is, all that you are"
This is poetic, but I don't think it's true. The world is too complex to model perfectly. It's easy to feel like a digital lens is the whole world, but it really, really isn't. Twitter != Voters
The small sat revolution is a big deal, but much mystery & magic remains.
Consider the impact that simply believing the relevant portions of the world has been modeled "well enough".
If magic and mystery is the good thing, then simply feeling like there's no place you can get to which hasn't been mapped might be enough to choke off that feeling, regardless of the resolution of the map.
Absolutely. It's self-fulfilling belief. If you believe yourself to be trapped in an exhausted world, then you are. It's usually better to choose an abundance mentality.
The idea that the world has been mapped to the point of killing all mystery is ludicrous. The Map Is Not The Territory[1].
There are mysteries lurking in your own neighborhood that you won't notice until you traverse it in a new way. Go for a walk with a child or dog. Take a bike instead of a car. Use a wheelchair. Volunteer with local advocacy groups.
> There are mysteries lurking in your own neighborhood
> Take a bike
I do this... and then I map my discoveries in OpenStreetMap. I recently discovered OpenInfraMap [0] and that inspired me to go find infrastructure that wasn't mapped and add it too.
It works a little in reverse for me; I find a random thing that isn't mapped well and use it as a motivator to go explore it on bike or foot and then map it. I did this for a bunch of local creeks... ran along it, fixed up the errors, and then added all the individual ways to a relation. A lot of places that are accessible by foot only often aren't mapped, so I'll go explore a suburb and find the unmapped paths that shorten foot routes. Making the map better match the territory.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
― Albert Einstein
With a little creativity we should never get bored.
Imagine a world with so much mapped data that it too needs explorers. Data recorded generations ago that has never been observed by anyone to study it.
There are also mysteries that we can map, but still can't figure out. The weather is one of those - we can map the entire world, but we've yet to be able to create a model at a scale that allows us to make accurate predictions of more than a few weeks.
Additionally, the increase in space access is increasing the scope of humanity to well beyond the Earth. It may seem ludicrous now, but the same tech that makes cheap satellites possible will open up other worlds, in particular the Moon and Mars.
It’s not black or white. OP’s point is still true regardless - as time progresses, things do become more and more mapped. Be it a scientific field, a territory, etc.
I was just reading about the future space missions [0] to the outer solar system already planned within the next couple of decades.
"Whether it’s Dragonfly going to Titan, Clipper going to Europa, hopefully a lander going to Europa, hopefully a mission that’ll fly through the plumes of Enceladus, exo-planets going gangbusters, SETI hopefully taking on a broader and broader search and surveying those exo-planets. Within the next few decades we could potentially answer this primordial, age old question of, “Are we alone?” And that’s gonna revolutionize biology. It’s gonna revolutionize how we think about our place in the universe. And so for all of the pains and agony of trying to operate on these time scales, we do live in a beautiful time where we might transform the universe in which we live into a biological universe."
Along with the commercialization of space travel, I'd say there is a sufficiently large part of this universe we are yet to "touch" but soon will be able to.
I for one am tremendously excited about the future.
More than 90 percent of all galactic systems are moving away from us faster than speed of light. There is no way we can ever reach them. The unreachable horizon is capturing more and more of what we currently observe. https://youtu.be/4iC9Qi3y9q8
Right. To be specific, the whole of the Local Group is available to humanity for exploration. That still has a trillion stars, with at least as many planets.
> Consider the impact that simply believing the relevant portions of the world has been modeled "well enough".
That is dangerous belief to those caught-out by the edge-cases, especially seeing how actual humans lazily defer to, and others defend "the (application) system": see any HN thread on AI bias and/or Tesla Autopilots deficiencies.
Care to bring up any reasons why you believe the small sat revolution is a load of bollocks? I work in this industry, and can address questions or concerns that you may have.
I'll bite. Assume every person put a small satellite into orbit, just once. What problems do we have to overcome for what payoff? What revolutionary change do we open the door to?
Sat launch is at best an Engineering issue at this point. More satellites open up avenues for more data collection by well heeled interests, additional burdens on municipalities when the bloody things deorbit, or worse, if they don't. It already obstructs or complicates ground based observation and launch/mission planning/tracking, and adds excessive risk from debris based on current propulsion methods.
It does nothing to advance the State of the Art in manned spaceflight (one of the species more pressing challenges), and it'll become costlier and costlier to get common fuels for rocketry as demand spins down for fossil fuels elsewhere.
I just guess I don't see the point in throwing more autonomous junk into space beyond the minimum necessary to get the job done, or to hyperfocus on any endeavor that doesn't eventually culminate in people in space self-sustainably.
Maybe I've spent too much time mired in Cost-Benefit Analyses recently and it's killed my ability to dream and imagine, but I just don't sea more passive satellites doing what everything else up there already does, but better and with a queue fixing anything; it'd be a boon for launch companies I guess, but do you really need to be in orbitt to solve half the problems people generally throw mini-sats at? I'm not sure the answer is yes.
I think you're downplaying the benefits of more small-sats bring to multiple industries and giving too much weight to certain negative side-effects.
For starters, let's address some of small-sat applications. In you comment you said "I don't see the point... beyond the minimum necessary to get the job done". What job specifically are you referring to? Navigation aids? Communications? Because "the job" that can be handled by small-sats has near unlimited scope. I'm sure you've already heard about LEO communication constellations (such as Starlink) that are bringing world-wide communication infrastructure. Communications infrastructure is a pre-requisite for industrialization, and can greatly assist with providing education to remote areas. Both of these have the potential to lift many of the global poor out of extreme poverty. Communications infrastructure is something that is very easy to take for granted living in a developed first world nation, but the net benefit it provides to society cannot be understated.
People like to focus on the big extravagant projects popularized by eccentric billionaires, but the CubeSat space is filled with other valuable applications as well. Here are some other industry applications that don’t get as much time in the spotlight:
- Poaching / illegal fishing detection and monitoring
- Data collection for weather / climate models
- Extreme weather forecasting / detection
- Forest fire monitoring / detection
- Space-based astronomy
- Agriculture monitoring
The above list won't directly impact your day-to-day like the smart-phone revolution did, but that list indirectly touches many aspects of our lives. So again, which “job” are you referring to “getting the job done”? The list above alone (even excluding the comms constellations) could easily require 1000s of CubeSats. The interesting thing about the CubeSat revolution is that because it’s so cheap to send something into space, every possible niche is being explored as industry scrambles to carve out their slice. This comment “but I just don't see more passive satellites doing what everything else up there already does” is not one at all shared within the industry. The CubeSat revolution is doing things that have never been done before. And is doing the things that had been done previously cheaper, faster, and better.
Now let’s talk about the downsides. The space junk and Kessler Syndrome problem is typically brought up in the context of the CubeSat revolution, but it is largely misplaced. CubeSat applications typically require low-earth orbit. In low-earth orbit, atmospheric drag is sufficiently high that junked satellites de-orbit naturally in reasonable time-frames. In addition, placing these satellites into such a low orbit does not create large amounts of junk during launch/insertion. In addition, with space now accessible to more than just government agencies, the appropriate regulatory frameworks for managing space traffic / space junk are being drawn up. The commercial benefits of open, accessible space create huge incentives for governments to manage these issues.
I also see you are disappointed that the CubeSat revolution does nothing to advance manned space-flight. I assure you; this is far from true. In the early days of space exploration, space was very expensive. People focus on launch costs, but it’s much more than that. Supply chains didn’t exist. Nothing was mass manufactured. Everything was custom made. This is changing. The space economy of scale is ramping up, and government-led “for the good of mankind” projects are directly benefiting.
I’m all for learning how to do space flight better and getting all the regulations in place and getting experience with space launches. The only thing that worries me is whether we will end up in some situation like we are now with plastics that appear everywhere in our food supply chain and are a problem also because the unknown unknowns.
Will we still be able to operate society when we rely so much on all the services provided by These smaller satellites and there is a solar flare. Indeed, what if some event does trigger the Kessler Syndrome. Just like see radiation from Fukushima show at the us west coast in fish.
Will it be too late to do something with all the knowledge we have gained?
With the CubeSats revolution there aren't a lot of unknown unknowns. The risks are clear, and the benefits far outstrip them. Again, as mentioned above, Kessler Syndrome is of little threat in the low earth orbit which CubeSats operate in.
I don't really understand the argument that coming to rely on CubeSats puts us at risk because they could be damaged by a solar flare. And therefore we shouldn't reap the benefits of this new technology? That line of thinking is like rejecting the advancement of electricity because we will be worse-off in the event of a power outage. Sure, black-out incidents occur, and sometimes (like the recent Texas outage) people are ill-prepared. But how is choosing not to pursue electricity because of black-out risk the better alternative? Surely benefiting from the technology in the far more common scenario of normal operation is better than not having it at all.
I swear people watch one highly dramatized movie and think we're something in imminent danger of running out of space up there. We certainly ain't, and it's not like companies don't consider these issues.
I don't think so. Reading a book or watching a show isn't about the fastest route to a conclusion. To borrow a phrase: it's the journey, not the destination.
IE: I'm watching The Crown right now. I've been "spoiled" on the outcome of the show through simple history and cultural knowledge (I'm Canadian). It doesn't make the show any less enjoyable when I know that Diana is going to die, or that Mountbatten was killed by the IRA.
There’s a different, maybe even better kind of enjoyment from surprises (or non spoiled events) in my experience. I won’t watch any movie trailer or read a review so that I go in as
uninformed as possible.
Only if the events of the plot, or unrevealed information are critical to the story. Some stories tell you what's going to happen early on. You know Oedipus is going to kill his father and marry his mother, the story is about how events conspire to fulfill the prophecy despite him trying avoid it.
J. Michael Straczinski (Babylon 5) said he likes to tell people what's going to happen, but he doesn't tell you the context. This lets him put in prophecy as a story element.
Other times the story is really about discovery. You can guess that Harry Potter will bring about Voldemort's demise in book one, but the series is about the process of Harry becoming Harry, so it's not really possible to give away any spoilers because you have to explain too much.
Well, thank you for spoiling it, now I'll need to read Electra's instead.
I always wanted to write a story about a bunch of people in a lab, playing god. In this universe there would be no rings of hell, the reader would also know there wasn't, but I think it would still grip the reader. Like an inverse hero's journey.
hm. Here's a story: on our second visit to China, one of the main targets was Mount Emei, which is a well-known tourist hotspot. On the top, because of the buses and cable cars, there were probably thousands of people - we couldn't see due to the ridiculously thick fog.
And then we started to walk down. The shortest path down on foot is ~50km stairs. We met roughly 10 people, including the monks in the monastery we had to sleep midway.
Had there been people there before? Yes. Is it secluded? Yes. Did it feel like a discovery? Yes. And I'd even count it as a spiritual experience, despite the fact that we never really left the civilization.
Another story: when we were in Uppsala, Sweden, we visited a place called Norra Lunsen. The young lady in the ticket office literally asked as why do we want to go to the middle of nowhere - and indeed, we met a single person there.
The point to "discover" at our current stage of evolution - in the sense of we can't yet travel across star systems or galaxies - is not to go to places where no human has been before, but to find places that give YOU a new experience.
As I explored this incredible University town I discovered the most special treasure..
The “Silver Bible”, not a Christian bible but a collection of “all the knowledge of the day” encased in a silver cover. It had been lost for 500 years and discovered again under some floorboards. To this day one of the most amazing world treasures I’ve seen with my own eyes.
In a nutshell, you can intentionally choose to prevent others’ perception of a place from spoiling your own. One step further, you can even use their perception to enhance your own experience.
You’re standing in a place that your extremely distant ancestors and cousins once stood, in a place where your nieces and nephews and children might one day stand. You’re connected to the narrative of humanity.
The concept of “first” is a red herring in the narrative of humanity. It carries a lot less meaning than our current culture leads us to believe.
There are a lot of places in Siberia or Antarctica where no man has ever been closer than 10km. You are welcome to visit. But the trick is, there is nothing of real interest there. No old temples (if there is a temple, you are certainly not first there), no sculptures, no food or lodging. Being first to discover some exotic island in the Pacific sounds romantic, but in the reality it is far less glamorous. Just rocks, trees, maybe some sand. The main object of travel are people and other cultures, and this is the only meaningful discovery one can make.
Except for discovery of self. If you are fortunate to get to a spot where no "man" has trod, you can feel it. A feeling of amazement, a surreal loneliness. It is awesome. Are you afraid? Alone? Teeming world is just, over there. Yet here are no ghosts. Empty of human soul. But, rich in nature's soul. Wonderful, contemplative experience.
But the others were not there when you're there and certainly not with your state of mind. The world is not static and neither are you, which presents infinite possibilities for unique experiences and perceptions.
Few people are capable of *real* exploring anyway. Going where no human has been before. Shackleton, Amundsen, Mallory, Harrer, Bonatti, to name a few Euro-centric ones, did so. To do what they did at that time was extraordinary and way beyond any if our capabilities.
And what Insta calls an “Adventure” is merely a tightly controlled and carefully crafted theme park visit. It’s a joke.
That said, any place is there for you to discover. Nobody fucking cares if you visited the Grand Canyon or some fiery hole in Iceland. And even less so if it has been trodden on by humans yet.
All that matters is having a jolly time in an alien place, detached from anybody’s expectations. Don’t chase the next Insta spot.
Go early in the morning. Go in bad weather. Go off-season. Take your time and the rest will reveal itself.
I often travel without a guidebook. To discover a temple without a guidebook, and without having seen single source of information on the location around it, that is real discovery. Everything is unexpected, including finding that temple. If you take this approach, you will inevitably depart having missed many of the places listed in guidebooks. But so too did the discoverers of the past who had no guidebooks. You can't have it both ways. My advice is to forget the buck lists. Just go experience a place. Stay awhile. Discover it for yourself. And if you do have guidebook, travel to places not mentioned. Far from having "no place to discover", the world still has every place to discover.
I like to go to places and rent an apartment for a few weeks. Then discover your neighborhood. It's fun when you move, and it's also fun when you vacation this way.
That said, I'm not out trying to discover a previously undiscovered waterfall.
Some of my friends explore underwater caves. This is one of the only remaining ways that an ordinary middle class person can discover places that literally no one else has ever been.
I absolutely agree that cave diving is a way to get where people have never been before, and to explore the extraordinary.
But to remark on those people as "ordinary middle class" is a bit misleading. I'd probably lean more towards "extraordinary, and possibly middle class." Otherwise, I think the appropriate label for any normal person doing cave diving explorations is "dead."
(Not serious criticism, hopefully you read in a playful tone)
With every day bringing more and more construction. Tearing down of historically important buildings for new contemporary condos and gentrification - cities have lost their soul to me. Its not there's nothing new to discover, for me, its the replacement of places people once wanted to go to.
I actively seek out abandoned places now. I try and think about what it was like when it was new, people bustling about. Or that abandoned mansion. How did those people live? Can I imagine what it was like to live in a huge house like that?
We have such a disposable culture now - architecture included, it has prompted me with a sense of nostalgia to seek out what has been left behind and why.
Gentrification is what happens when you don't tear down old buildings for condos. The old buildings let fewer people live there, and therefore only the rich lived in them.
Tokyo is cheap because Japan treats houses like used cars - it's actually cheaper to sell the house if you tear it all down first.
I'm mixed on that. I love neighborhoods with lots of tiny mom & pop stops and am sad when they get torn down and replaced with a modern building that usually gets filled with chain stores. This is common in Tokyo.
On the other hand I mostly dislike SF's old houses that have 1 bathroom for 4 bedrooms, creaky warped floors, paper tin walls, single pane glass, bad insulation, and are missing many modern conveniences. And I hate that the city doesn't build up ⬆
New Zealand and Hawaii are the most recent human settlements, and those were more than 500 years ago. Anywhere else has been home for somebody for millennia. You can't "discover" somebody's home, but you can discover the creek around the corner.
there's a highway interchange near my house with wooded area between the entrance ramp and the highway about a half mile long until they converge. every time I drive that stretch I wonder to myself when was the last time a person spent any significant time getting to know that plot of Earth.
Probably there were a bunch of construction workers there the last time that Ramo was resurfaced. Also the periphery is probably regularly mowed by the state DOT.
What's ironic is that the person who posted the quote actually can't remember where it's from, their comment saying so is, at this writing, one comment down.
Well it might even have been in another language, or with totally different words... It's just an envelope, as the saying goes, it takes one to recognise one. The envelopes for the messages that is.
This is a very interesting quote, thanks. If I understand correctly, Even if a lot more data is available, because of chaotic systems this causality of events cannot become totally deterministic. Otherwise we could predict the weather perfectly.
I find it comforting, somebody else might too :)
I hope this isn't a rehash of other replies, but this is a classic chauvinism, of the sort that humans have been subscribing to throughout recorded history. It's easy to feel confident when you don't know what you don't know!
Yes, it's like that story about a pigeon in a test box that whenever he flapped its wings food would come. I would like to learn pidgeonian just to tell him that not everything is what it looks but to not feel bad, because when everything can look like something and be explained easier through that, everything else falls by the side.
pbronez had some great replies below. I wanted to add that more data = more questions. The more we understand, the more we'll have to find out and contextualize. There's more to exploration than mapping
The more you understand the world as it is, the easier it is to change what it is. Take joy in creating something new, not stumbling upon what has already been made.
This is fundamentally wrong. I doubt the NGA is actually lying to these writers and more likely just not saying anything and leaving people to guess, but we have long had the ability to see the entire earth and commercial imagery is still a tiny, insignificant part of the national geointelligence enterprise with capabilities dwarfed by the state-sponsored tech this writer doesn't know about. Private companies gaining the ability to track vessels that turned off their transponders is cute and all, but this is not a new capability by any stretch.
>commercial imagery is still a tiny, insignificant part of the national geointelligence enterprise
This is a false statement.
Without getting into things that aren't talked about online, I assure you that commercial imagery is regularly used in .gov/.mil settings for a variety of purposes. This includes gap-filling (both geographically and historically), the ability to disseminate product widely without sanitization, etc. There's nothing insignificant about its use.
We may just disagree on what counts as significant for whatever reason, but I have had direct access to the resource management and capacity planning database of ADF-E and ADF-SW showing exactly how many of each geointelligence product was created and disseminated and for the RROC this included products being created from commercial sources. To me, they were not significant, but I understand this is not necessarily the case at a tactical level, for many of the reasons you're giving here like impracticality of downgrade to a classification level that actually allows you to disseminate to a forward-deployed commander only cleared for Secret.
For MDA specifically, though, we cracked that nut and can downgrade to the point we're just giving out pngs with no evidence of where they came from.
The significance of the proliferation of such technology is that there will actually be people and processes 'watching' the screen. To my mind this is fundamentally different than the knowledge that a few state actors had the capability but not the manpower (or desire) to do so.
Sort of and sort of not. I keep typing up long comments all over this post and then deleting them and I better just stay away. I'm not at all comfortable pushing the limits of what I can actually say without getting in trouble, even if it isn't technically classified. If you mean data like this isn't already being collected on every vessel on earth and accessible from a terminal somewhere, that is incorrect. Creating the system that does that was exactly my job five years ago. If you mean the Navy largely doesn't care what you're doing and isn't really paying attention if you're not a drug runner, pirate, or state actor, then yes, that is true.
Exactly. Focusing on capability gives you a very myopic view of the situation. Capabilities are a moving target, with very few truly revolutionary leaps between the first film-based spy satellites and whatever we've got today.
Proliferation is huge. I can buy a high-resolution satellite photo of my neighbor's property every day if I feel like spending the money. That's something that wouldn't have been available at any cost a decade or two ago.
Lots of little cameras up there. Ok. They can see ships. That is a far cry from total surveillance. There are countless physical limitations that prevent the concept of total space surveillance, from lens diameter to the atmosphere's absorption of certain frequencies. I remain far more concerned by the cameras in my apartment building, or taps on my internet/cell connections, than I am about space cameras.
Be more worried about your local police operating airborne camera systems. Drones hovering over cities are far far cheaper than any space-based surveillance scheme.
I listen to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast and they often go into open source analysis of North Korean or Saudi or whoever's current projects based on finding test sites with pictures from this sort of commercial satellite imagery. Recommend if you think that sounds interesting.
Interesting that ships turning off their AIS transponders can still be picked up from their radio or naval radar signals from orbit.
It seemed a bit extreme that the single satellite RF detection and localization technique referenced in the article would get classified by the U.S. government -- it's presumably a beamformed angle & doppler measurement going into a detection algorithm which is aware of the motion of the satellite platform, which is cute but not groundbreaking -- but at the same time it's probably a very inexpensive technology for space-based surveillance of RF emitters, which has obvious national security ramifications.
Is there a good history of spy satellites anywhere? It ought to be amazing - I remember watching Ice Station Zebra as a kid, where super-spies fought to the death over a canister of film, and now Google gives away better resolution photos.
The US downgraded moon photos to prevent Russians getting an idea of the quality, Russian subs were analysed with one photo and a scratch on the titanium plating. It would be great to see that playing out - technology, analysis and politics shown together.
You gotta do some digging through the archives at The Space Review[0], but Dwayne Day has some outstanding articles over there on NRO projects. Keywords to look for are HEXAGON and NRO.
I believe some US military bases are hidden on Google Maps. But it's not an issue if you're trying to find them. You can derive their location from soldiers doing laps around the base and uploading their run data to Strava.
This is due to arms control treaties. The ICBM bases and other critical infrastructures can't be hidden, because the other side needs to be able to verify with their own eyes that you're complying with your part of the treaty, and vice-versa.
My dad was a Capt. in the USAF in the mid 60's. He was stationed at Minot AFB, ND., and launched a new test Minuteman, but of course he didn't know it was a test at the time he and his partner were ordered to turn their keys during the height of the cold war with the Soviet Union. I have a plaque with the key he turned (the teeth were filed off though) along with a poster-sized color photo of the missile coming out of the ground and his issued 38 special S&W revolver. Since he was locked away underground with 1 other person for days at a time with no contact with the outside world, I was wondering why they had guns. He said it was in case your partner didn't turn their key after ordered to do so...
One thing he got a kick of before he passed away, was using google earth to check out the old base. He was surprised at how much you could see.
The nonfiction book Into the Black by Rowland White has a portion about the Space Shuttle's use launching NRO satellites. This is a fascinating use of the shuttle not many talk about.
Reading about the two nacro subs captured in the last year it's pretty clear you don't even need to go deep.
For a long time I was under the impression that diesel subs stand out like a sore thumb on sat photos and nation states watch them all like hawks, but apparently not and drug cartels can just roll around as they please in them.
In many ways its harder to see something through water than it is to see it through rock. Ground-penetrating microwave radar can get through tens of meters of quartz but centimeters of water. VLF and ULF penetrate 10-100x farther through the ground than through seawater. The frequencies that can penetrate more than a few hundred meters of water are around the same as the ones powering your lights. Antennas at those frequencies are miles long. You need special, non-conductive soils and bedrock to make them work. In short it's a real pain in the butt.
After 200 meters the ocean is practically opaque. Objects much deeper than that are reflecting a handful of photons. Below 500-1000 meters you're talking about photons per second at the surface.
Water is one of a quite small number of general radiation absorbers. To block alpha/beta/gamma radiation you need pure density- more mass per volume to slow down high energy particles. You can use heavy atoms like lead or uranium, or very densely packed lighter atoms. Neutron radiation is different- the actual number of atoms per volume is critical to maximizing the number of scattering events. That means you use things like polymers- hydrocarbons, so you have as many small atoms (hydrogen) in a volume as possible. Water is one of the denser liquids, while still being 11% hydrogen by mass, vs 14% for pure polyethylene. That makes it quite good.
Even sound isn't great underwater, relatively speaking- being a fluid in motion, there's a constantly-changing distortion on everything. The thermal conductivity also means thermal signatures spread out quickly.
Water is a poor medium for photons, but a great one for sound. That's why the US and other countries surveil the seas with linked arrays of underwater microphones, i.e. the Integrated Undersea Surveillance System (IUSS).
Diesel subs at 30 meters become nearly invisible. They're hell to find. And if they stop, they're really, truly silent. The best way to find one is don't lose it in the first place. Track it from base it's entire trip.
Pardon my layman ignorance on this, but they still need to surface pretty often right? And the diesel engines leave a distinct signature when they surface to recharge the batteries?
Watched countries argue a bit over diesel vs nuclear submarines and this is where I've been imprinted with the idea that nuclear subs are the only actual true stealth subs you can build. I may be wrong here, but the evidence seems overwhelming based on usage. Diesel subs are for homeland defense purposes and don't worry about the enemy knowing their whereabouts, nuclear subs go silent for months and everyone is completely clueless as to where they actually are.
True. But they're stealth enough, can operate with a snorkel without completely surfacing and modern li-ion battery tech allows them to operate underwater for weeks.
Small ones. Additionally, the military intelligence agencies with access to spy satellites probably don't care about blowing their cover or capabilities discovering makeshift drug running submarines.
Yes, that's sad. But on the other side it's strange, because I did read, from at least one private company, they would have every 20 Minutes pictures from the whole earth. And there are several of such companys and many government agency who make pictures nonstop. So I think there should be a pic from MH370 somewhere.
I am fairly sure, no one is taking pictures of the whole earth, in 20 minutes intervals in a sufficiently high resolution to pick out an airplane. Specially one, flying over water.
For reference, ISS at its height ~400km, can see roughly 3% of the Earth's surface. This is without any kind of lens.
If someone has any kind of evidence, showing it otherwise, it would be great to see.
Nobody is going to offer evidence otherwise. Here’s a quick estimate for what you’re talking about: the Earth is about 500 trillion square meters of surface area. An image where each pixel was a meter would be a 500 TP (terapixel) image. Even with impressive compression the downlink requirements alone are insane, even ignoring all the other issues that would have to be worked out. Edit: just for fun, I estimated the file size- likely between 50 and 100 terabytes per image. We’ll get there one day, but no satellite constellation is downlinking that much data just yet. https://toolstud.io/photo/megapixel.php?compare=video&calcul...
The bottom line is that nobody is imaging the entire surface of the Earth at any useful resolution daily (aside from low resolution meteorological satellites, but they can’t find a plane). If you want to track a plane you have to start with other means to point a camera and take an image.
There is a huge difference between a company that has enough satellites in orbit to be able to take an image of any requested area within 20 minutes, and a company that can take an image of all areas on Earth every 20 minutes. MH370 is very unlikely to be captured in an image by coincidence. If there is imagery of it during its last flight then it would be because someone knew in advance that something was going to happen (it seems unlikely that anyone would have known).
Who would take a picture of the entire earth as a single image at one time?
Take that 500 Trillion Square Meters and divide it up by 1000 satellites (or whatever Starlink plans) and take images sequentially rather than all at once and it becomes rapidly much more manageable.
You don't need a single mult-terapixel image. You just need lots of much smaller images covering more territory on a continuous basis.
if you wanted pictures of the entire earth every 20 minutes, you'd need to figure out how many satellites would give you that coverage, the amount of resolution per image, and the bandwidth requirements transportation of those images in parallel.
Realistically, to get whole-earth coverage every 20 minutes would require a very large constellation of satellites. It's much more reasonable to get some less-than-100% coverage of the earth on a less-than-every-20-minute schedule and scale up from there.
The motivating discussion here was that a commenter up a few levels was talking about how there just had to be some images of MH370 even if nobody tasked a satellite to track that specific plane. The suggestion was that we had constellations in operation that took images of everywhere on Earth every 20 minutes, so the plane had to show up somewhere, we just needed to sift through the images. But the commenter above me pointed out that was a silly assumption and I supported that comment.
It doesn't matter whether you have a few satellites with a wide field of view taking a few huge images, or a bunch of satellites taking a bunch of smaller images- the grand total is about 500 terapixels to image the Earth at a 1 meter resolution. That's a ton of data to downlink regardless of how you collect it. Assuming great compression, this hypothetical system would have to be downlinking 50 TB every 20 minutes- that's over 300 gigabit/s. That's more than the downlink of a $600 million satellite (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViaSat-2) just to get some crappy resolution images. No civilian company is collecting anywhere near the entire surface of the earth at resolutions good enough to spot a plane. You are not tracking down MH370 if your approach is to find it in old satellite imagery. No satellite is taking pictures of vast swaths of empty ocean because there was no profit in it.
Theoretically, if Starlink satellites had cameras of that sort of caliber on-board, pointed down with wide enough lenses, they could capture the entire planet continuously and feed that data back down at close to real-time.
Very excited to hear that they'll be able to track these bad actors who are damaging the commons. Also VERY cool that they can discriminate and therefore identify ships based on small variations in the electronics even for a specific model of radio. Also - curious how the French govt is going to keep this tech under wraps.
The author is a lay person, they're just trying to report what they've been told. In reality, single satellite detection with the described resolution is extremely simple and the tech has been flying since the 60s. There isn't a lot of magic new tech in RF, just advances in processing.
This one's my favourite. It's rare you get a good look at some of the best classified satellite imagery available anywhere (there are some doubts whether this was actually a satellite image, but it seems likely).
I see a few comments where people refer exclusively to satellite imagery despite the fact that this story is about RF-detection satellites.
Has Hacker News ever flirted with a "commenter did not read the linked story / page but is pretending they did" vote feature? There's obviously room for abuse even if it were limited to "reputable" users but I would use it on some comments on this item.
I think that for a lot of regular commenters, it's more about the discussion than the article that started it. Fealty to the original content is secondary to conversation.
I suppose you're right, though I'd call it less "fealty" and more "relevance".
In this case, it looks like the discussion in the comments flies to a subject that people feel they have familiarity with (satellite imagery) instead of what is actually contained in the article (satellite RF detection) and thus the conversation on the article strongly suggests that the community is _not_ assimilating any information from the article.
I suppose I should be the "candle" and just talk about RF detection rather than "cursing the darkness".
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
Revisit is getting better and satellites have an edge when it comes to total coverage of the earth, but the 120,000 flights around the world each day typically fly predictable routes at low altitudes near urban centers (takeoff and landing). This presents a massive opportunity to leverage all of that "free energy" and use aircraft for earth observation. Coverage can be supplemented with satellites, but revisit of aircraft is far greater for many terrestrial locations.
2x/day revisit for most of the world is probably sufficient for the majority of use cases, but that assumes good weather (for images). On the other hand, LAX for example sees hundreds of takeoffs and landings each day, so if you were interested in modeling retail foot traffic by parking lot volume, pace of urban development, rate of containers moving in and out of port, etc. you could get a massive boost in temporal resolution using aircraft and far cheaper than launching + maintaining a satellite constellation.
Maybe, but aircraft tend to follow much stricter paths than one would normally believe. Particularly around urban centers (airports) they queue up and only really fly a few routes through the area. On clear nights you can often see the lines of nav and landing lights forming as aircraft approach the city.
Unless something dramatic changes in the field of optics, lenses and how to deal with atmospheric blur at those distances, resolving features smaller than 15-20cm from low earth orbit remains a low probability.
Take a look at some youtube videos of a Nikon P1000 at maximum zoom looking through ordinary atmosphere at some distance away for an example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhQlwKX3LQA
I think the more likely use is supplementing existing facial recognition. Recognize a face on a security camera, then be able to track their movements out and about after that. Before, too, if you store the satellite footage.
Pattern of life analysis correlated with ground based intelligence, where your car goes, where it usually parks in the day and at night, etc. You would need a lot of LEO satellites to approach anything like persistent coverage, however, current sun synchronous things have very long revisit times for any particular site.
Atmospheric distortions are worse when looking horizontally though the atmosphere (think marriage on the horizon).
It's also only the bottom few miles of atmosphere that is really thick.
Looking vertically from 400km up, there actually isn't too much distortion. The limiting factor is making high enough quality lenses and getting enough light onto your sensor without too much diffraction.
The previous post argued that the influence of the air is less severe looking straight down. If we now go back to looking at an angle, we are back to square one, the problem of distortion due to the amount of air between the observer and the observed.
If I'm running the numbers right, then using the Hubble's maximum theoretic angular resolution of 2.8e-7 rad[1], something 400km up would still not resolve features smaller than 11.2cm. That's the absolute best, diffraction-limited case. Don't know how close we are to that on real-world optics.
There's probably a way to circumvent these limit by using multiple satellites working together[1], combining images to form a synthetic aperture[2], using an aperture mask[3], or a combination of any or all of those. Actually I'd be surprised if state-sponsored spy agencies were not already using this.
I forgot about synthetic apertures! IIRC the Event Horizon Telescope result had to include the model of what the black hole probably looked like to refine the image, it would be fascinating to see what could be done by a constellation of telescopes in LEO. Though the [3] link says that aperture masking only gets you to the diffraction-limited regime.
> Take a look at some youtube videos of a Nikon P1000 at maximum zoom looking through ordinary atmosphere at some distance away for an example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhQlwKX3LQA
While that's an impressive zoom, the camera is moving much slower relative to the targets (~0km/s) than if it were in even a low orbit. It's also imaging people at the extent of its zoom at only a few km away. In orbit it would be hundreds of km from its targets.
CubeSats and other small satellites can capture useful imagery but they're not spy satellites. There's optical limits to their capabilities because of their size.
The highest resolution images we know are possible in theory max out at around the 10cm level due to atmospheric effects. It seems we can get quite close to this with the big spy satellites the Hubble Space Telescope was based on. Fortunately we have a really great example available to examine.
It's known that the latest spy satellites have some kind of folding mirrors, and adaptive optics - things not being sci-fi anymore for a few decades at least.
The “theory max” is not that hardcoded, superresolution is a field and we don’t know what all they are up to with billions to burn. There were reports at some point about high altitude drones stationary above cities that can read license plate level data (not license plates themselves) at video rates over the entire city so who knows!
Faces no, as other people have said - except, what about integrated systems that combine ground based CCTV with satellites, or drones? You might only be able to see someone's head and shoulders, but that's good enough to follow them as they walk through a crowd, and you can use that to decide which CCTV to use. Presuming it's all networked and accessible, but that might be the case at some future point.
Underground. Under the sea. Under the ground under the sea. Pfffft. The sun was already trying to kill you that's why living underground is smart anyway. Frankly there should be no expectation of privacy for things you can observe from space...
and mines. With mines you would already have a good idea of the rock composition and layers. I wanted to put a literal "man cave" in a mine by parking an RV in one, but I can't find any good documentation on restrictions per state on personally owned mines vs. claims.
This isn't a good thing or a bad thing, it's all in how we respond.
This could lead to greater transparency, openness, and accountability, or it can be abused by a small group of people for their own power and profit. Nothing hypothetical about it either, both cases are already true.
Where’s the article? On mobile it just cuts off at “ HawkEye’s satellites could pinpoint these renegades by listening for faint signals emanating from their navigation radars and radio communications”.
In the middle of last year, Ecuadorians watched with concern as 340 foreign boats, most of them Chinese, fished just outside the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) around their country’s westernmost province, the Galapagos Islands. The law of the sea requires such vessels to carry GPS-based automatic identification systems (AIS) that broadcast where they are, and to keep those systems switched on. Some boats, however, failed to comply. There were more than 550 instances of vessels not transmitting their locations for over a day. This regular radio silence stoked fears that the boats concerned were sneaking into Ecuador’s waters to plunder its fish.
Both local officials and China’s ambassador to Ecuador denied this, and said all the boats were sticking to the rules. In October, however, HawkEye 360, a satellite operator based in Virginia, announced it had detected vessels inside Ecuador’s EEZ on 14 occasions when the boats in question were not transmitting AIS (see map). HawkEye’s satellites could pinpoint these renegades by listening for faint signals emanating from their navigation radars and radio communications.
HawkEye’s satellites are so-called smallsats, about the size of a large microwave oven. They are therefore cheap to build and launch. HawkEye deployed its first cluster, of three of them, in 2018. They are now in an orbit that takes them over both of Earth’s poles. This means that, as the planet revolves beneath them, every point on its surface can be monitored at regular intervals.
Initially, the data the satellites collected were downloaded to a tracking station on Svalbard, a Norwegian island in the Arctic Ocean. But business has since boomed. HawkEye now counts a dozen governments among its customers, as well as private clients. The firm has therefore recruited the services of a second ground station, in Antarctica, and it put a second cluster into orbit on January 24th. It plans three more such launches this year, and also intends to widen its network of ground stations yet further.
Given this success, it is hardly surprising that at least six other companies are operating or developing similar systems. Quilty Analytics, a research firm in Florida, expects the number of radio-frequency (RF) intelligence satellites of this sort in orbit to multiply from a dozen at the beginning of January to more than 60 by the end of next year.
Unmixed signals
RF-intelligence satellites detect where a transmission is coming from in two ways. One, trilateration, relies on measuring minute differences in a signal’s arrival time at each member of a cluster. The other uses the Doppler effect—the shift in a signal’s frequency if the transmitter is moving relative to the receiver. Together, according to HawkEye, these can pinpoint a signal’s source to within 500 metres of its true origin. Kleos Space, a Luxembourgeois company that launched its first cluster in November and hopes to put two more up later this year, says its accuracy ranges between 3,000 and 200 metres.
A cluster sweeps a band of territory 2,000km wide so, circling the planet every 90 minutes or so, it can revisit many areas several times a day. Moreover, unlike spy satellites fitted with optical cameras, RF satellites can see through clouds. Their receivers are not sensitive enough to detect standard mobile phones. But they can pick up satellite phones, walkie-talkies and all manner of radar. And, while vessels can and do illicitly disable their ais, switching off their communications gear and the radar they use for navigation and collision-avoidance is another matter entirely. “Even pirates don’t turn those things off,” says John Beckner, boss of Horizon Technologies, a British firm that plans its first launch in August.
RF data are also cheap to collect. Satellites fitted with robotic high-resolution cameras are costly. Flying microwave ovens that capture and timestamp radio signals are not. Horizon says that building, insuring and launching its August mission should cost no more than about $1.4m.
America’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), one of that country’s numerous spying operations, is a big user of RF intelligence. It employs HawkEye’s data to find guerrilla camps and mobile missile-launchers, and to track both conventional warships and unconventional ones, like the weaponised speedboats sometimes deployed by Iran. Robert Cardillo, a former director of the agency who now advises HawkEye, says dozens of navies, Russia’s included, spoof AIS signals to make warships appear to be in places which they are not. RF intelligence is not fooled by this. Mr Cardillo says, too, that the tininess of RF satellites makes them hard for an enemy to destroy.
Beside matters military, the NGA also uses RF data to unearth illicit economic activity—of which unauthorised fishing is merely one instance. Outright piracy is another. And the technique also works on land. In 2019, for example, it led to the discovery of an illegal gold mine being run by a Chinese company in a jungle in Gabon. And in 2020 the managers of Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo began using HawkEye data to spot elephant poachers and dispatch rangers to deal with them.
There are commercial uses, too. Andy Bowyer, Kleos’s boss, reports interest among telecoms firms keen to locate rogue transmitters, such as unlicensed ham radios, that are operating within their domains. Regulators, meanwhile, would like the firm to create “heat maps” of shifting patterns of legitimate transmissions. These would help them select sites for mobile-phone towers and also give them a better idea of the value in particular places of licences to use parts of the radio spectrum that are going up for auction. Some charities, too, have an interest in Kleos’s data. RF information can, for example, flag up routes taken by migrants likely to need food and other aid.
Declustering
Using satellite clusters to gather RF intelligence is clever. But engineers at Unseenlabs, a firm in Rennes, France, reckon it is already outdated. At the moment, Unseen has three satellites in orbit and sells data to about ten navies, including France’s, as well as to maritime insurers and a handful of big defence contractors. But its satellites operate independently, rather than as a cluster, for Unseenlabs’ engineers have devised a detection system, which they claim is accurate to within 5,000 metres, that requires but a single satellite.
How this system works remains a secret—and one that, according to Clément Galic, Unseenlabs’ boss, is protected by the French state. After several attempts were made to steal it, he says, the defence ministry’s Directorate General of Armaments offered its assistance in defending the details from cybertheft.
Secret or not, though, Unseenlabs may soon have competitors in the single-satellite-RF-intelligence market, for Horizon, too, says that it has worked out how to perform the trick—a claim backed up by the fact that its launch in August will loft but a single device. Shortly after it filed an application for a patent in America on the wizardry involved, the government there classified it. Even so, Mr Beckner drops a hint. The method involves assessing differences in the angles at which a target’s signals arrive during the satellite’s arc across the sky. Horizon says its system will be accurate to within 3,000 metres. By the middle of next year, it, too, plans to operate three satellites in different orbits—enough to scan most of the planet every two hours or so.
Horizon also plans to compile a library of unique radar-pulse “fingerprints” of the world’s vessels, for the tiny differences in componentry that exist even between examples of the same make and model of equipment mean that signals can often be linked to a specific device. It will thus be able to determine not merely that a vessel of some sort is in a certain place, but which vessel it is, and where else it has been.
Unseenlabs, for its part, has already catalogued the radar fingerprints of many thousands of vessels, several hundred of which have, subsequent to the events of last summer, spent time in the Galapagos EEZ with their AIS beacons switched off. It remains to be seen what Ecuador’s authorities will do with that information. But no one can say they weren’t told.
The current members of the board of directors of The Economist Group are: Rupert Pennant-Rea (Chairman), Zanny Minton Beddoes (editor-in-chief of The Economist), Lady Suzanne Heywood, Brent Hoberman, David Bell, John Elkann, Alex Karp, Sir Simon Robertson, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Chris Stibbs and Baroness Jowell.
Where your gait can be analyzed, and wifi analysis can correlate you by your heart beat and other things.
The thing is that after connecting all those databases, an AI can quickly figure out where everyone has been and what they’re up to. And as the Five Eyes shares info, you can ask friendly countries to spy on your own citizens.
There is a limited amount of orbit space and limited amount of satellites that can be launched. Building too much infrastructure around them is risky and not a good idea for long term stability.
I am worried about many things. And I think we are already in serious trouble with regards to pollution and climate change.
For this one thing, spy satellites in low Earth orbit, I am not so worried. Without active re-boosts, these orbits tend to degrade quickly, and the junk gets dragged out on a relatively quick timescale.
Medium orbits, however, can last a super long time, and junk up there is a very serious concern.
BTW, as the average global temperature rises, the atmosphere expands, which will degrade the orbits of the lower satellites even quicker!
A lot of these are in orbits as low as possible to maximize resolution. Orbital debris is less of a concern there because it tends to de-orbit quickly. In contrast to SSO where debris stick around like with that NOAA satellite just broke up.
Human manufacturing seems to pollute everything. Plastic in the bodies of water etc.
It’s the tragedy of the unmanaged commons! People don’t care about exponential growth issues until it’s a few seconds to midnight. Except in the case of Kessler syndrome, it’s even worse because it grows AFTER you stopped.
Bitcoin mining electricity use is another big example.
