That said, the blue dots are "unknown" - what could those possibly be? Not trying to be conspiratorial or anything, but is it some sort of debris from classified operations or foreign intelligence operations?
That said, the blue dots are "unknown" - what could those possibly be? Not trying to be conspiratorial or anything, but is it some sort of debris from classified operations or foreign intelligence operations?
The US Space Force does a lot of the object cataloging, and they occasionally will pretend one of their classified satellites doesn't exist, but there's only a handful of these.
Huge if true.
The interesting aspects of them have to do with how far off-axis they can function. This was the major consequence of loss of the Morison leak of the KH-11 shots of a Soviet carrier to Jane's Defense Weekly — the image revealed how far off-axis it could image and some clues to how it processed imagery.
I don't have any domain knowledge here, so can't argue either way, but one possibility I can imagine is it's a place holder for "somebody launched something and we just don't have the records yet". No clue how realistic that is, and I'd trust my sibling comment's explanation more, but it wouldn't shock me if it takes time for info to propagate.