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Comment by cabirum | Hacker News Reader

Because these are either spy sats or even weapons in space disguised as "methane detectors".

If you're going to post quite sensationalist speculation please at least provide some attempt at a source or rationale. It doesn't really pass the sniff test that any goverment would bother with this banal subterfuge when they are more than capable of putting secret payloads into orbit, and have done so many times[1].

e.g. this, just the first relevant thing I could find https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/04/26/spy-satellite-successf...

Secret payloads which are impossible to track via radar or optically either from the ground or via other satellites? Really? Tell me more.

There was Zuma, the classified satellite that officially failed to separate from the payload adapter and burned up in the atmosphere but was widely speculated to be a successful test of stealth satellite technology, with the satellite successfully reaching orbit and going dark. A lot of talk about us knowing very little, but everyone loved to show off this graphic from a stealth satellite patent [1]. Of course if the NRO does a good job and the technology works we will never know that it does.

1: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DTW_zc_W0AEH3Un?format=jpg&name=...

Widely speculated by advanced radar owners and high-power telecope owners? Can you give me a few names?

“Many” seems to mean only a dozen-odd. Which seems like an awfully small number to image the entire earth at meaningful levels of resolution or frequency.

Which also seems to be the article’s lesson.

FWIW, it looks like Starlink alone is up to 5,942 satellites in orbit [0] these days

[0] https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html

> it looks like Starlink alone is up to 5,942 satellites in orbit [0] these days

Starlink operates by far the largest constellation of satellites. Definitely the largest commercial constellation. That's like saying Google "just" serves ~8.5bn search queries/day. I might be mistaking your implication tho.

the field of view from LEO (for Starlink) is so much smaller than from GEO. I'm not sure what the orbit is for the methane satellites, but the number of satellites alone isn't the only factor.

If SpaceX cared, the Starlink fleet (both satellites and ground stations) could be the biggest, most sensitive radio telescope in the world, without compromising its usefulness as a network. It points in all directions at the same time. With such sensitivity, a very short "exposure" time is plenty.

Each node records a few cycles of analog waveform at a certain atomic-clock time determined by its position, and forwards that to a common collection point to correlate with the others.

The Starlink satellite antennas all point at the Earth. The antennas are also small compared to radio telescopes. They also listen to specific frequencies. They would make the best radio telescope for detecting Starlink customers.

The customer antennas would make poor radio telescope because the antennas are small. If using array of small antennas as radio telescopes were possible, we would see them. Using interferometry requires measuring positions and times to sub-wavelength. The Square Kilometer Array is the closest, but it is small extent, with large dishes, and many low-frequency antennas.

People who have not done a thing can always make up reasons why it would be impossible. People who do things learn to ignore them.

Why would they need a cover story? They launch spy and other secret satellites all the time, openly announcing when many are launched.

The post goes into details about coverage vs. resolution and shows you the data from the satellites and your first thought is that it's all a big lie/coverup?

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