What a tweet tells us about spy satellites [video] | Hacker News Reader

What a tweet tells us about spy satellites [video]

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How it was tracked back to USA 224: https://github.com/cbassa/satellite_analysis/blob/master/nah...

The really astounding part of all this is that hobbyists have been monitoring the exact orbits of all the US spy satellites for years. They know exactly where they're overhead and when. That kind of capability used to be something that only a handful of states had, and now people just do it from their homes and post it to the internet.

"Who watches the watchers?"

Civilian space nerds!

“but who watched them?”

CIA, and we’ve gone full circle.

https://xkcd.com/1910/

Indians used this knowledge to hide their first nuclear test at Pokhran from US spy satellites

https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/society-the-arts/books/st...

Oh wow this is the coolest thing I’ve read in a while

For a bit more corroboration of that analysis, this is what SunCalc says the sun direction would be at that time (9:44:20 UTC, 14:14:20 PM local time) pinned at the base of what (i believe) is that specific launch pad. Elevation of the satellite will affect the apparent angle some, but this is pretty convincing:

https://imgur.com/bSDLBmI

That image is absolutely bonkers, the more I look at it, the more I admire the satellite's creators.

Also, the analysis around the image is fantastic. The data and methods that they used to calculate the height of the satellite, timing of picture etc. it is a treat to see for someone sitting and seeing this unfold on the sides. I remembered this article [1], of Indian Anti-Satellite Test, India claimed satellite was hit on downwards trajectory, and then released the footage with no telemetry redactions. Analysis of that footage showed that missile hit the satellite on the way up and not downwards. Same with North Korean Missile launches, any time any imagery is released or test happens, so many insights come in. OSINT community is seriously amazing. I hope more such 'leaks' occur.

[1] - https://thediplomat.com/2019/05/why-indias-asat-test-was-rec...

That picture is bounced off a 2.4m mirror from nearly 400km away, calling it flawless would be an understatement!

The image has also been heavily compressed (after it was annotated), so we're looking at a very poor version of it. So yeah, bonkers is probably the best term to describe it.

Scott Manley has a lot of great content. He also does Let’s Play of Kerbal Space Program which is how I initially came to know of him. His videos on rocketry and Space Stuff are basically how I keep up to date.

The man is a legend. Really knowledgeable but fun at the same time.

He's also a DJ, I believe.

Hence his username on many platforms “DJSnM”.

From what I understand, it was already well known that the USA could take satellite photos of things, except not at the level of quality/detail as the one shown in this image.

Is that a distinction without a difference?

I suppose in theory now that this information is out there regarding capabilities, you know this for sure, but would you have guessed the capability is not there if you were making a decision that factored it in?

My guess is you would assume that this capability exists.

If I wanted to be really good, I would assume 10x this capability exists.

Big difference between inferring and confirming and knowing

>My guess is you would assume that this capability exists.

>If I wanted to be really good, I would assume 10x this capability exists.

The video says that the quality was already at the limit that 2.4m mirrors can achieve. The fact that the spy satellites had 2.4m mirrors was already known (from hubble design documents).

So basically if you were the baddies and were preparing for the worst case scenario (as you should), you were covered. If you got lazy and didn't, it was a wake-up call.

Two things I got from the video:

1) The videos of the launches are scary, especially the launches with the "A" rockets, and the fireball surrounding the rocket at the beginning of the launch.

2) It's a shame the patch with the Klingon text never made it out into the wild.

What I got from the video is that we have hundreds of Hubbles around the Earth but only one of them is pointed outwards at the stars.

Yeah. A couple of years ago the NRO discovered they had a couple more sitting in a warehouse they forgot about, and gifted them to NASA. Sadly they still haven’t been launched due to NASA nonsense. But still.. the intelligence agencies had two extra Hubble’s they didn’t know what to do with.

And one of the conspiracy theories is it only happened to camouflage their true potential by gifting the defective one.

I'm not sure how you got 'hundreds'. He named five satellites with this level of quality or greater. The hundreds of tiny cubesats have about 30x less resolution, squared.

Nothing our enemies did not already know.

And what of our citizens?

China and Russia sure, Israel perhaps. Turkey? Probably? Pakistan maybe? What about Libya, Iran, or North Korea?

Everybody knows the specifics now, and even the less well funded adversarial agencies will have a much firmer idea of just how good the adaptive optics of KH-11 are.

It doesn't matter, the level of detail is so good that no camouflage can hide your secrets.

This tweet says: we can see anything we want to see. We know when you're lying, don't even try.

any link to the tweet itself? I cannot watch the video

The tweet itself is Trump twittering a picture of the launch site on a rocket in Iran.

I believe this is the tweet from Trump:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11674933719732551...

What Trump leaked about billion dollar spy satellites...

The good news is that there is a redacted area in the image, so Trump probably didn't just snap and post ... evidence of some limit to the impulsiveness of the commander in chief.

The black box on the top left? I'm assuming that's just redacting the classification level, which was surely Top Secret.

The interesting thing about the black box is that it is square to the frame of the image and slightly skew to the text boxes in the original intelligence product. This indicates the image posted is not simply a camera phone snap posted directly to Twitter, the image was edited before it was posted

...are you assuming that there isn't someone at Twitter who monitors Presidential Posts before they go out. I assume there must be.

Twitter can't keep it's CEO's account secure, and does not review his posts.

I doubt they do anything special for the POTUS aside from exempting his account from the platform's rules.

Which rules is he exempt from?

All of them:

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/publicint... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20295754)

> there are certain cases where it may be in the public’s interest to have access to certain Tweets, even if they would otherwise be in violation of our rules. On the rare occasions when this happens, we'll place a notice – a screen you have to click or tap through before you see the Tweet – to provide additional context and clarity. We’ll also take steps to make sure the Tweet is not algorithmically elevated on our service

Thanks.

The actual text (not POTUS specific):

Who does this apply to?

We will only consider applying this notice on Tweets from accounts that meet the following criteria. The account must:

- Be or represent a government/elected official, be running for public office, or be considered for a government position (i.e., next in line, awaiting confirmation, named successor to an appointed position);

- Have more than 100,000 followers;

- Be verified.

Not just Top Secret. It would also be classified as TK (Talent Keyhole).

The classification system is compartmentalized to limit exposure of things -- like raw intelligence & intelligence gathering capabilities -- to those who really need to know.

That's the genius of compartmentalization IMO. You can always simply add more compartments.

The top left would have been information about the picture. Time/Date and source.

That's also what I'd guess, tho kinda funny how censoring that out turned out to be kinda pointless.

I agree that Trump "probably didn't just snap and post". His Twitter account has always been shared between Trump personally and his staff. Frankly, calmly sharing facts and evidence like this is 180° from the pattern of Trump's more impulsive tweets.

Edit: Furthermore, Trump's personal phone is an Android, and this particular tweet was from iPhone.

It's been reported he uses 2 iPhones: https://9to5mac.com/2018/05/21/president-trump-iphone-use/

I hold the understanding that its possible to view a license plate from space. I suggest you keep to that view in mind as well.

Viewing a license place it not the same as reading it.

Yes, but if there is video instead of a still frame, it may be possible to put together what the characters on the plate are.

Not with that resolution (7cm / pixel).

We know what can be written on license plates, and we know that license plates don't change over short times, so it's possible to determine which characters best match the sequence of frames even if no individual frame is readable. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-resolution_imaging

The resolution of this satellite is about 5-7 cm per pixel which is about the limit of what's possible with the 2.4m mirror it uses. You'd need a mirror at least 10x as large to read license plates, and that's if they were pointing upward.

There are certainly no 20-30m telescopes in space (Also, imagine how annoyed astronomers would be if they found out the biggest most advanced space telescope in history was in space and pointing down...).

I do wonder what would be possible to resolve using multiple 2.4m scopes to create a larger synthetic aperture?

Resolving text on a license plate which would be at a very oblique angle (so more atmosphere) is probably not worth trying.

You don’t need multiple to get improvement in one dimension: it’s moving.

For something that will hold very still, you can wait for the next pass and synthesize.

> * imagine how annoyed astronomers would be if they found out the biggest most advanced space telescope in history was in space and pointing down*

Well, rumor is that Hubble was just a repurposed spy telescope, so astronomers probably should be annoyed :)

Annoyed? Sure. Surprised? Only the naive would be.

If there was a 3-5m spy satellite I wouldn't be surprised, but if there was a 20-30m spy satellite (I.e. a project likely larger in scale and complexity than the ISS) then I'd be surprised.

But we followed the making of hubble long before it launched. Why would anyone believe such a silly rumor when the development of the telescope was in the open?

What makes it a rumor? In the video Scott states that the “cost saving measure” of reducing the target mirror diameter down to 2.4m was to use the same manufacturing as these exact spy satellites.

Do you not understand that if a top secret spy satellite is gifted to astronomers, a cover story - i.e. a lie - will be made up about how it is developed by brilliant civilians?

Likewise it should be understood that the more complicated the coverup and the more detailed the lies, the more likely that cover story is to fall apart.

Given the cooperation with the ESA and with the difficulties in grinding the main mirror, I find it far less likely that it was a platform gifted to NASA by an intelligence agency.

I understand you believe that but I don’t have to believe it myself and that kind of condescending tone isn’t really necessary here, especially defending a conspiracy theory. The existing publicized NRO grants, including the keyhole satellites mentioned elsewhere in the thread, suggest the simpler answer is more accurate. The Hubble development was heavily publicized through its lifecycle, including the repair after it was deployed. Why bother with such a performance when next time the NRO donates a satellite they publish about it for the PR?

You would need thousands of civilians to take part in your life then. Not easy.

Hubble wasn't but a pair of Key Hole satellites (KH-11) were.

https://www.americaspace.com/2012/06/06/top-secret-kh-11-spy...

Hubble was built by the same contractors that build the Keyhole satellites. They whole idea from the beginning was to reuse the spy satellite hardware for astronomy.

Almost everything is reusable between these applications, just need a flatter mirror. Which was also what they screwed up.

>Also, imagine how annoyed astronomers would be if they found out the biggest most advanced space telescope in history was in space and pointing down

NASA's under-development WFIRST telescope is being built using old outdated hardware that the NRO didn't want any more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...

Perhaps worth noting, there are certainly telescopes of this scale in space--they're just radio telescopes, where the reflector can conveniently be unfurled after launch.

You can glance at this thread [0] for comparison of commercial and speculated military antenna scales (up to 100m!)

[0] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/32884/what-is-the-...

I'm of the understanding that this was not a single image, but a composite image, taking by different satellites, planes, and/or drones.

The US could have build test facilities in their deserts, have a 3-D model available for proper reconstruction, and then learn to stitch and skew back all imagery into a single composite image. There may even be some "filling in" or "sharpening" of pixels or textures that could not be observed, but are guessed from their context.

In the framework of composite imagery, it would indeed be possible to zoom in, until you get to camera's capturing road traffic (maybe the license plate was not observed in the moment the main photo was taken, but was remembered from an observation by traffic camera 30 minutes ago and stitched back onto the object: composite imagery through time).

Finally, you could use multiple non-image sources for the composition. If three (ground) sensors capture the noise, heat, or vibrations from a train on a train track, you can now triangulate and draw the location of that train on space photos at a timestamp of your choosing.

Why do you believe it's a composite image?

> the license plate was not observed in the moment the main photo was taken

I believe there's a limit on resolution of a space satellite. If you're suggesting the traffic cam reads the plate, how are you going to connect the coloured blob that is the car with an image taken by a traffic cam at a different time in a country that doesn't give you access to its traffic cams?

> Why do you believe it's a composite image?

Because it is common to reconstruct a signal by taking multiple measurements, instead of a single sample. The field of compressed sensing broke ground on effective sampling. If (some) error is random noise, then you can remove this by majority vote. It is ineffective not to re-use that high-resolution secret drone fly-over footage, when composing satellite imagery at a later date. Inpainting, upscaling, de-oldifying, automatic coloring, 3D modeling, composition (see black hole photo process) etc. have become common usage in the ML community, and so I have reason to assume these techniques are also used to enhance and improve the resolution and unobserved guesstimates of satellite imagery.

> how are you going to connect the coloured blob that is the car with an image taken by a traffic cam at a different time in a country that doesn't give you access to its traffic cams?

Install road-side pointing camera's inside rented housing / contracted freedom fighter homes? Hack the traffic cams?

Didn't the NSA track mobiles in foreign countries by installing similar beacons / hacking sensors in bigger cities? That would theoretically allow them to view through the car roof and "see" who is in the backseat.

> The spy agency is said to be tracking the movements of “at least hundreds of millions of devices” in what amounts to a staggeringly powerful surveillance tool. It means the NSA can, through mobile phones, track individuals anywhere they travel – including into private homes – or retrace previously traveled journeys.

> The NSA provided some input into the report, with one senior collection manager, granted permission to speak to the newspaper, admitting the agency is “getting vast volumes” of location data from around the planet by tapping into cables that connect mobile networks globally.

> According to the Post, the NSA is applying sophisticated mathematical techniques to map cell phone owners’ relationships, overlapping their patterns of movement with thousands or millions of other users who cross their paths.

Maybe mixed terminology, to me a composite pic is one where sections or entireties of several pics have been arranged to make a larger or more detailed one. What you desrcibe is different, but ISWYM.

> Install road-side pointing camera's inside rented housing / contracted freedom fighter homes? Hack the traffic cams?

perhaps, sounds a bit james bondish though :)

The author of James Bond, Ian Flemming, worked as a commander for British Naval Intelligence, an officer for the 30 Assault Unit, whose task it was to gather intelligence behind enemy lines. His brother worked with "stay-behind" freedom fighter networks. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ruthless

I did not know that.

Fair swap, graham greene was also a spay[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Greene#Travel_and_espio...

[0] typo, but I rather like that one.

This is anecdotal, and no idea how real it is, but my dad flew reconnaissance for the USAF in the 70s and claimed to have the capability to read license plates way back then from very high altitude (no idea what qualified as very high altitude, but assumed they were not easily detected from the ground).

Let's do some napkin math. A quick websearch suggests spy sats orbit around 200-800km, while U2 flies at 20km.

Let's say you can use the same camera system on both. Then 10cm resolution at 200km orbit means 1cm at 20km, which would be enough to read a license plate.

You can't put a 2.4m mirror on a U2.

I believe the SR-71 had cameras that could resolve even more detail than license plates.

Edit: seems that I’m wrong. 6” ground resolution

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