Yinpiao Zhou Charged with Drone Flying over Vandenberg | Hacker News Reader

Yinpiao Zhou Charged with Drone Flying over Vandenberg

justice.gov

35 pointsmistrial919 comments

Also, 'they' let the drone operates for an hour despite been flagged?? What about data sent real-time. Shouldn't the drone been 'cancelled' as soon ad spotted?

Small discussion (8 points, 20 hours ago, 4 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42394463

I wonder what a drone shot would give the CCP, that they wouldn't already have from satellites.

It's a potential goldmine. Spy satellites are on orbits and follow a very regular predictable path. I recall reading Patriot Games back in the day and terrorists had satellite timetables scrawled on a board so they knew when to cover their gear up with camouflage.

I can not believe that modern ones stay perfectly static without any built-in maneuvering capability to periodically change their orbit. I also can not believe that there isn't effectively continuous coverage of important sites by multiple satellites. You really think the billions (trillions?) of dollars spent on such equipment is completely outsmarted by people just covering things up on a set timetable?

Has one ever had too much information?

Those period adjustments of orbit can be detected and accounted for and the fuel to make frequent and erratic changes is prohibitively expensive to carry.

Drones can also get better quality images than even many if not all spy satellites due to how close they can get to objects compared to the satellites.

I speculate that there are US satellites up there watching the movements of Chinese satellites.

I suppose they also have signal monitoring, the commands to the Chinese satellites would be encrypted but the mere detection of a signal should cause the observers to warn whomever it may concern within the US military/government behemoth.

Now I'm imagining signals being hidden in Chinese satellite TV uplink, amongst the Chinese pop music videos...

Isn’t fuel on satellites very limited?

Are you sure?

The Pentagon doesn’t like much of anything to be known about its satellites. The Vera Rubin Observatory will likely make awkward eye contact with some of them. Many of them are telescopes in their own right, but instead of tilting up toward the sky, they point down at Earth. … Each time the telescope were to take one of its 30-second tile images of the sky, the file would be immediately encrypted, without anyone looking at it first, and then sent on to a secure facility in California. … Three days and eight hours later, the entire tile image would be released to astronomers, untouched by black marker or any other technology of redaction. By then, the spy satellites would likely have gone somewhere else. They are elusive, after all. Their orbits are irregular, and they shift direction often. Not even the world’s most accomplished astronomers would be able to infer their present locations from a line of light streaking through a three-day-old image.

When a Telescope Is a National-Security Risk: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/12/vera-rub...

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