I know the "technically correct" answer must be yes, as there's some increase in chance, but what realistically is that chance?
It's also technologically possible that they could have met the requirements, with a special size exemption from the FCC, by putting a radar corner-cube retroreflector on each corner of their tiny satellites, thereby artificially increasing its ability to be detected by radar, but they chose not to.
No. In this instance, it doesn't matter for this specific data to be parsed twice. The overhead would be minimal. But what if we stopped refactoring code and appended new feature onto existing code? What if we didn't bother to remove defunct API calls, and instead, we discard the old responses and just made new ones with new data?
That's why we don't just launch satellites. 4 (I think it was 4) additional objects 10cm across won't have much of an affect. The problem is when everyone starts launching satellites of various sizes no matter if they can be tracked or not.
However, as stated in TFA, the satellites turned out to be quite trackable.
Live tracking: https://platform.leolabs.space/catalog/L19943
> the SpaceBees have shown themselves to be easily trackable by the Space Surveillance Network, as well as by LeoLabs, a California-based company that provides orbital data to commercial-satellite operators and others in an effort to prevent collisions.
I'm not sure if "Space Surveillance Network" is the same thing as "Space Situational Awareness", but it does sound like the US Government is capable of tracking these things.
Radar also suffers from atmospheric attenuation, so there's a tradeoff between frequency, power, wavelength, etc.
I don't know what systems they're using to track LEO objects, but it's certainly within the realm of reasonable.
A decent primer: http://faculty.nps.edu/jenn/Seminars/RadarFundamentals.pdf
I'm going to guess here, but you might be thinking that orbits are permanent and space is empty, so once you observe the point of insertion, you can calculate object's position anywhere in the far future. This is very wrong. Orbits are unstable and decay with time, due to residual atmospheric drag, solar radiation, interactions with Earth's magnetic field, the irregularity of the Earth's shape itself, and other factors. All of these combine to the need for continuous active monitoring of space around the Earth, and recalculation of trajectories of existing satellites. A satellite needs to be trackable in order to be able to update its trajectory, as it changes naturally.