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Comment by fergbrain | Hacker News Reader

Apparently it has “excellent views of Holloman AFB and White Sands Missile Range” (https://reddit.com/r/SpecialAccess/comments/9f91sm/_/e5uy1fd...) . Further down, someone says that someone claims that the Chinese were using the antenna array at the observatory to spy on missile tests at WSMR.

If the place was truly low on staff then this theory may not be so far fetched.

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The national RCS test facility is at Holloman, all kinds of interesting test pilot units out there as per the public website.

If you pull the list of current NOTAMs for Holloman, normally the tower is part time but is open continuous from 10-sept to 14-sept. Must be busy. As per the NOTAMs they are also doing a lot of construction work at Holloman, heavy construction vehicles all over and wingspan limitations to avoid hitting them.

My guess is the somewhat abandoned research facility will come off lockdown after the 14th.

My understanding of the research facility is its in transition and likely unsecured; once its secured to some minimal level, law enforcement will ignore it when they're doing something "interesting" at Holloman.

Or, when whatever test equipment they're installing at Holloman is covered by an opaque radome, they'll reopen the research facility.

What do RCS and NOTAM stand for? Also, is there a link where you can, as you say, "pull" this data, or is that from a non-public system? Thanks.

RCS = Radar Cross Section, so they are measuring how a plane appears on radar in various scenarios.

NOTAM = Notice to Airmen, info bulletins about all kinds of things relevant to air traffic (from "this area is off limits temporarily" over "this airport has a broken navigation beacon" to "there's a festival here that's allowed to point lasers at the sky")

EDIT: In the US can be fetched from https://pilotweb.nas.faa.gov/PilotWeb/ – Location HMN is Holloman AFB

You'll note that NOTAMs and also METARs (weather reports) are written in a very terse, heavily abbreviated syntax that seems to originate from teletype/telegraph days.

Another good google term is OSINT open source intelligence.

One source says they've got THE number one national secret radar lab, what could be hurt by making that public? Another source admits the place is brimming over with test pilots. Another source says they're doing a massive heavy construction project. Another source says this is a period of high optempo for flying despite heavy construction limiting runway operations. A great place to observe the AFB, such as a semi-abandoned observatory, is under temporary lockdown.

Note they're only locking down a great place to park a van full of radio observing gear, not locking down every little hiking trail where you can optically observe the base. Almost as if the AF base were a national secret radar lab; oh wait, it is, per their own public website and historical events.

Individually nothing above is classified or "intel worthy" but in combination if it isn't a week long systems integration test for some kind of anti-aircraft radar experiment, they've gone to great lengths to make it appear in public to be so. And that's the whole OSINT thing in a nutshell.

Comically, if they're not doing this kind of activity, you have to ask why not, since that kind of activity is why that publicly known national radar lab exists in the first place. I mean, if they're not doing what they're funded to do, that in itself is some kind of conspiracy theory.

I suppose the whole thing could be a psyop to determine conspiracy theory susceptibility; have a known, public, radar lab, do radar lab things, and see who freaks out is a valid psyop experiment. Personally I think the HAARP project of the 90s was more of a psyop troll along the lines of the above, than an actual scientific study OR an actual conspiracy theory. Some scientific research did happen, but mostly I think they just wanted to F with Art Bell listeners and see how they respond.

Of course, OSINT can be a diversion up to and including faking the whole thing by releasing a small number of cheap and easy irrelevant press releases and seeing which vans full of electronics equipment driven by foreign nationals sit in parking lots in sight of the base; its entirely possible literally nothing is going on inside the base, its all a counter-intel operation. A honeypot operation. Maybe some foreigner took the bait and drove up to the observatory surrounded by FBI agents with a van full of monitoring equipment, that would be an epic troll of a foreign intel agency, usually they keep that kind of thing quiet and we'll never hear. Possibly locking the place down and closing the post office and getting news coverage including here is a component of the counter-intel honeypot operation, LOL.

OSINT is more of a method of analyzing seemingly unrelated data, than proving any hypothesis. But the OSINT synthesis of the situation boils down to "a known military radar lab appears to be extremely busy doing radar stuff this week".

I'm skeptical of that theory. Sunspot is up in the Lincoln National Forest. There are multiple trails and locations that have a great view of White Sands and Holloman AFB, which are located in the basin below. There isn't anything special about the view from Sunspot that I can recall.

Other than a big telescope great for looking at things far away?

I used to work in astrophysics. Telescope operators are expected not to look in certain places. Those were fun conversations.

My guess is they found a spy.

What kinds of places were you told not to look? (I'm guessing you couldn't physically point it at targets on the ground, so I assume certain sections of the sky.) Who was it that was commanding you not to look?

I won't elaborate. A neat book just came out though : Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military https://g.co/kgs/XdRZFu

Thanks for the link. I haven't seen the book, but I know when I took a computational physics class as an undergrad (~25 years ago), there was a definite overlap between the modeling necessary to understand stellar collapse, and the modeling necessary to build better nuclear weapons.

A late friend who worked on type II supernova simulations was once invited to talk about his team's software with some gentlemen at an NNSA lab, Los Alamos or Livermore or Sandia (I forget which one.)

At the conclusion of the talk, the DOE guys said appreciative things about the current work, but also pointed out that certain avenues of investigation into certain characteristics might lead to the gov't declaring this software classified, and restricting who might have access to it. My friend was at the time not a US citizen, so he would have been locked out of contributing to his own work.

"Nice piece of software you have there, would be a shame if something...happened to it..."

Did they attempt to open source the software?

Hopefully not

IIRC, the code in question was written under an NSF grant, and probably not that hard to obtain.

There's a story about a US astrophysicist grad student working on stellar evolution. A visiting Soviet scientist came to give a talk. At the end the student asked a question about one aspect of the talk, something like, how do you know the plasma is transparent to photons at that temperature? The visiting Russian just said "it is." Later, the grad student mentioned it, quizzically, to his advisor. His advisor pointed out that it was something that came out of nuclear bomb research.

I looked, but could not find that anecdote.

Since subcosmos won't answer, I'll take a guess: Spy satellites.

Anyone can look at those though, they can't really hide them

Not every hobbyist had access to 1m+ mirrors, though. I imagine you could take a reasonably revealing picture of eg an Orion: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(satellite)

I don't understand this thread. Sure with enough effort and manpower you can prevennt your own civilians from discovering these. How would the US government stop civilian entities in say Russia or China from discovering these? I still see a marginal potential utility though: not showing adversaries that you have noticed their satellites (in order to prevent them from improving their stealth).

People have done a lot with less than 1m.

http://www.satobs.org/telescope.html

https://satelliteobservation.net/2017/04/20/observing-satell...

I gasped when I read their main antenna is 330’ wide.

Not as easily if they're equipped with this: http://www.bisbos.com/space_misty.html

Wouldn't that also obscure the camera? I don't actually know what spy sattelites would be used for besides visual imaging aimed at Earth.

Could easily be intended not for visual surveillance but for gathering electromagnetic signals, where an inflatable dome would not be a problem.

I worked on a project that happened to have some spy satellite data as noise...

You can hide them. A common practice is to do an orbital maneuver when the satellite is directly between the Sun-Earth line-of-sight, where attempts to use instruments are pretty well saturated/destroyed.

With that said, it is still possible to see where the satellites go after such a boost if you are able to look really close to the limb of the sun with the right kind of equipment :)

I work adjacent to some satellites that do visual-spectrum imaging of the earth, and even we fall under these regulations.

In addition to all the NOAA licensing for imaging the ground, you need extra licenses for taking pictures of space. (it's useful, for example, to image the moon as a way of calibrating cameras & telescopes without atmospheric interference, and tracking stars is one of the most reliable ways to determine spacecraft attitude)

One of the requirements is that if we take a picture of space and there's anything moving in the picture (presumably a near-earth satellite), we delete all copies of the picture and forget we ever took it, but only after offering it for sale to the Air Force at a commercially reasonable price.

I'm sure there are additional layers on top of it, that's just the facets of it that I've been exposed to in the mandatory company-wide regulatory training.

> but only after offering it for sale to the Air Force at a commercially reasonable price.

That sounds like a business model - what is a commercially reasonable price, and where do I sign up?

> That sounds like a business model

Does it? You have one potential customer, and you have to create product on spec, offer it to them at a price you don't control, and destroy the unsold material whether or not the one customer pays for a copy.

Building a viable business model around that without corrupt influence over the single buyer seems impractical.

Sure, the US has considerable leverage over the sorts of things people are allowed to launch into space, but I have a hard time believing it could maintain a similar degree of control over ground-based telescopes.

Wasn't Sunspot a solar observatory? Wouldn't its telescope be set up for light levels that would make viewing anything on the ground rather problematic?

Its a coverup to prevent the public from learning that the sun is actually flat.

Everybody knows that, how do you think night works? It's when it spins around us and shows its back.

Shhhh .... at least don't tell them about the giant space turtles

Edit: nice username ;)

approximately flat, a big hole in the heavenous sphere, not sure if flat or curved makes sense for a hole

Sure, but it's a big telescope mostly buried in the ground designed to look at the sun. Not sure how much use it could possibly be in relation to its proximity to White Sands and/or Holloman.

There are multiple telescopes there.

Solar observatories need to track the sun, so they use a little mirror (heliostat) at the tunnel entrance that changes angle to track the sun, so you can point it anywhere.

http://www.astropixels.com/observatories/KPNO/KP80-127.html

I am curious as to what would happen if an organization that owned a large telescope was unwilling to cooperate with such a request.

it'd likely have something to do with a long-term non-optional residency as guest of the government in Leavenworth, Kansas

What law would this violate? Please be specific, as legal definitions of things like espionage are often not as broad as a layperson might guess (and on occasion, they're broader).

> What law would this violate?

Once the party was informed, and thus had knowledge, of the national defense sensitivity involves, it would seem arguably to facially violate the Espionage Act of 1917, as amended; in particular, 18 USC §§ 793, 795, and, if they attempt to publish the pictures, 797, and/or, if the order originates with NASA, 799.

Specific enough?

There's no way prosecutors and courts would actually commit to an Espionage Act conviction of an astronomer for looking at the wrong part of the sky. That's absurd.

Looking? No

Photographing and publishing or sending to unauthorized parties foreign or domestic, bet on it. You might get away with a stern visit from one of the 3-letter-agencies if it's minor importance and ignorance, but do it again...

If you doubt it, please do the test and report back the results.

This guy makes an entire artistic career photographing classified things from public places: http://www.paglen.com/?l=work.

There’s even an active hobbyist community tracking and photographing classified satellites for public message boards: https://www.popsci.com/zuma-spy-satellite-amateur-astronomer....

This isn’t Soviet Russia.

Of course it is not Soviet Russia, and I'm aware of those activities.

It's one thing for amateurs doing those 'trainspotting' type of activities with commercial- or even professional grade equipment, but another to do it with research-grade telescopes and listening equipment.

Obviously the amateurs are basically unstoppable, and are getting the same level of open information that any foreign agent can get by looking in the open. Nothing new is lost and there is no purpose in chasing the amateurs.

However, we're talking about professional astronomers with both higher-grade knowledge, much higher-grade equipment (and likely operating under at least partial govt funding for the project or equipment), and operating under some regulations and laws. It is silly to expect that being noticed breaking those laws or regs would go un-addressed.

But, as stated above, if you feel differently, feel free to do the actual test and report back your results.

793 requires "intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation", but 795 and 797 could potentially apply. Thank you.

Perhaps we just found out?

Since it's just about abandoned it's quite possible that foreign agents covertly installed surveillance devices to monitor the nearby bases OR someone noticed something or saw someone trespassing. That would certainly explain that level of activity including a blackhawk.

The views of the AFB and missile range are truly excellent.

Google Maps panoramic view: https://goo.gl/ckkCQc

That yagi-uda in the image makes it plausible that some form of sigint could be conducted there under the cover of mountain telescope operations.

Sarcasm? I just see trees.

I've seen this repeated often, but it doesn't seem to be entirely true - it has an excellent view of White Sands National Monument, not the White Sands Missile Range, which is about 20 miles NNW.

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