Amateur astronomers tracking the world’s spy satellites | Hacker News Reader

Amateur astronomers tracking the world’s spy satellites

supercluster.com

136 pointsn0pe_p0pe27 comments

I'm super late to the party here, but I thought this was an interesting story.

I used to work on a space program, and one of the guys on my team had been in the industry for quite some time. He told me he hates these amateurs. Not because they're enjoying a hobby, but because they're so damn good. Without getting into specifics, his company had launched a spy satellite at one point that was fairly revolutionary in that it was able to perform its task without a formerly necessary (large and expensive) component.

These amateurs noticed it and started talking about it online so fast that his company genuinely thought someone had broken their security clearance and told the public about the new development. They investigated a bunch of people at the company before finally being like "holy shit, these guys are just really good".

I really enjoyed the experimental layouts the various stories had. Had an art magazine feel to it.

Check out Trevor Paglen for more: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=paglen&sort=byPopularity&prefi...

I especially liked his CCC talk "Seeing The Secret State: Six Landscapes" [1] a lot.

[1]: https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5604_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201312282...

Doing God’s Work with Other People’s Money.

i get file not found on any of the video downloads at this link? Anybody able to get it?

Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j56s46e97Lo Just finished watching, amazing talk :)

https://web.archive.org/web/20151101062311im_/http://cdn.med...

> Atlantis lifted off from Kennedy Space Center to deliver a human skull

What?! I don't have time right now to read the entire article, but I did read maybe 1/4th of it and didn't see any other mention of this payload. There's also no mention of the word "skull" anywhere else on the page. Why in hell would a human skull be shot into orbit??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-36

It was an experiment to test radiation effects; the In-flight Radiation Dose Distribution (IDRD) experiment:

This joint NASA/DoD experiment was designed to examine the penetration of radiation into the human cranium during spaceflight. The female skull was seated in a plastic matrix, representative of tissue, and sliced into ten layers. Hundreds of thermo-luminescent dosimeters were mounted in the skull's layers to record radiation levels at multiple depths. This experiment, which also flew on STS-28 and STS-31, was located in the shuttle's mid-deck lockers on all three flights, recording radiation levels at different orbital inclinations.

Calm down, it was part of the skeleton crew.

Where they trying to create a skeleton key?

Love this - super well-researched and layouts feel different in a good way.

"Northernmost canadian provinces" Um.. they are not provinces. They are territories. Most all the provinces start at the us boarder and end well short of the arctic circle. It is like saying Guam is America's most western state.

And bonus points for any american who can name the territories relevant to this article.

I didn't realize Canada had such a heterogenous national composition. Thanks for highlighting, and the poster below who linked to the wikipedia article on the provinces and territories.

West Coast native here (Oregon and California). I got Yukon, if it's relevant.

Can my friends in the mysterious east fill in the others?

None of the territories are actually in the east. The other territory in question is presumably the Northwest Territories, since Nunavut is the anachronism.

For an Oregon boy like me, the "mysterious east" is everything from Idaho on. Just like how East Coast Americans charmingly call the east-central part of the continent the "Midwest".

> Just like how East Coast Americans charmingly call the east-central part of the continent the "Midwest".

Most New Yorkers couldn't show you where North Dakota is on a map, let alone most of the Midwest states like Michigan or Kansas. Most of the East Coast people I know refer to the Midwest as "fly over country".

If you think in terms of settlements on the east coast, considering expanding westward and buying land in the Louisiana Purchase to do so, the term "midwest" makes more sense.

The east starts at whatever point the mountains end. If you cannot see a treeless peak on the horizon, you are in 'the east'. Sorry texas.

I don't think I'm ever going to get used to the fact that people who live in Indiana call it the Midwest. If anything it should be called the Mideast...

a map of Canada’s provinces and territories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_and_territories_of_C...

Yukon is one of the two. But they also made a third a few years ago that didnt exist at the time discussed in the article.

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