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Comment by anormalpapier | Hacker News Reader

Not so stealth eh?

I'm sure you wrote this in jest, but in case people aren't aware: The "Stealth" in "Stealth bomber" refer to hiding the plane from anti-aircraft defenses like radar, infrared, acoustics and some optical visibility, but the anti-reflective paint that is used for hiding it optically is only on the underside, not on the top.

I wonder if imaging from above could actually be a threat for these planes. I mean -- stick cameras on all the SpaceX satellites and you've got an awful lot of eyeballs in LEO, right? Might at least be able to tell a ground based radar where to focus their search...

They fly in the dark and IR imaging doesn't work very well due to coatings and trying to hide the engine heath signature.

When each signature refers to the previous one, it forms a Heath Ledger?

Pretty sure you need powerful lenses to do useful things though, but who knows, maybe this is workable with some image processing of multiple satellite feeds?

Yeah, I'm sure somebody is already doing good work on whatever the photographic equivalent of Synthetic Aperture Radar is. They should call it Synthetic Lens Aperture Photography, so they could use SLAP as the acronym (the most important property of a research topic is of course the ability to come up with good titles).

For example:

SLAP BASS: a Synthetic Lens Aperture Photography, Bandwidth Augmenting Sensor Suite

Does it make technical sense? I have no idea. But it sounds cool!

They often fly their missions at night time, so this would mitigate that.

During the 1999 yugoslavia bombings, after the first one was shot down, there was a joking apology on the TV, something along the lines of "Sorry, we didn't see it" :)

> During the 1999 yugoslavia bombings, after the first one was shot down

That was a F-117 Night Hawk “Stealth Fighter” (a type which is now retired), not a B-2 Spirit “Stealth Bomber”.

Incidentally, the F-117's fighter designation was a misnomer; they were only armed with bombs.

Not just the “F” (“A” would be expected from role), also the “117” was anomalous (under the standard numbering convention, it should have been something like the 19 if it was in the F series, which is the designation that speculation about it was typically associated with before it was officially announced.)

The Serbians made a poster saying "Sorry, we didn't know it was invisible" after they shot down a stealth F-117. The full story and a picture of the poster at this link: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/serbs-shot...

Interestingly, it gives us information about the orientation of pixels on the satellite.

Sort of. IIRC they take quick back to back photos with different filters that share an image sensor, so the smearing you're seeing is the combined motion vectors of the satellite and the aircraft.

to be fair, stealth has never meant "invisible" when it comes to planes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr9KS-hmXyU

you can see the engine exhaust plums, and that would be pretty bright in IR. Very hard to hide burning that much fuel. If you magnify a bit you also can see that the engine exists are pretty bright even in visible wavelength (though that isn't visible from the below and front of the plane).

Trevor Paglen would agree.

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