Aircraft detection at planetary scale
planet.com
planet.com
Now if we reduce the time resolution somewhat and accept we may not know at the exact moment where any particular plane is but that it will get captured on a satellite every X minutes you can really start cutting into those numbers.
If they "disapear" it's no great mystery as to where they might be .. they have thoroughly planned to within a metre flight paths and are on contract to drape specific areas.
However, they are loaded with instrumentaton: magnetic sensors, radiometric sensors, EM sensors for EM surveys, multiple GPS receivers and calibrate to neutral for data collection runs (like zero'ing a scale with a empty tub on when cooking to just measure the tub contents and not the tub).
There's an aversion to unshielded equipment, extranuous broadcasts, and pilots wearing glow underwater divers watches with radium dials.
Perhaps others had different practices or flew different instruments such as optical photogrammetry.
If you're seeing gridding at 80m ground clearence perhaps it's crop spraying or perhaps your software is infilling lines from turnpoint position blipping with nothing for the next 50km.
EDIT: I note you submitted this article and have an interest in aerial surveillance programs, I'm simply recounting the practices of one rather busy Australian geophysics company thta was subsumed into Fugro some time past. We considered aircraft and crew safety and had a 20+ year no crash no lives lost record and regularly considered aircraft position signals .. that said we avoided "polluting" the spectrum with broadcasts when aquiring signal and largely relied on off grid checkins (even just three radio blips) ever few completed lines.
I dare say some operators contracted for non EM work (say, radiometric survey) might broadcast during aquisition lines but I find it hard to believe that a good operator would broadcast during EM runs.
Aeromag and radiometrics tend to be low level and tight; 80m ground clearance, 200m line spacing (unless for regional levelling of multiple small infill surveys).
Photogrammatic sureys are higher with much wider spacing, the frames are large and there's really only need for a 50m or less overlap to get a good broad area mosaic.
I'm guessing you have routines to analyse and classify flight activity by path characteristics and coarsely bucket activity?
http://www.astronautix.com/u/us-a.html
It probably wouldn't be feasible to have a single constellation tracking both aircraft and ships. Different types of radar operating on different frequencies would be needed for those applications.
The antennas of satellites like USA-223 alone are so big that they could probably pick up wireless game controllers lmao
I think once the Ukraine war is over, maybe in years to come, the impact of US intelligence will become fully clear. I'm fairly sure it was due to US intelligence on the location of Russian ships like the Moskva that they were taken out, and that doesn't even need particularly high resolution cameras.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@47.4343334,19.2735672,4635m/dat...
That said: it's actually fascinating that Google Lens found that so quickly. I guess there are many overhead photos of airports, and each airport has a relatively distinct shape?
I subconsciously block anything LLM-chat related by default, just as I do with ads. I tried looking through a source of that photo in the text above, text which seemed less AI-coded, but wasn't lucky (or I didn't know where to look).
> it's actually fascinating that Google Lens found that so quickly
It's one of their (relatively few) most recent successes, yes, of which not that many tech people are talking about. Or at least I haven't seen it discussed on forums like this one. For example it's also particularly good at image finding locations based on pieces of architecture seen in the photo backgrounds, let's say part of a church, a mayor's office, stuff like that.
Being able to google lens whatever can be seen of a gothic-like cathedral in the background of a photo and getting the name of the cathedral and of the city itself almost instantly is some CSI-level stuff, again, a rare win for public-facing tech these days.
(If you’re not travelling at the right speed of course)
Military aircraft don't use ADS-B out a lot of the time. Spy planes are obviously not going to transmit their locations. A civilian plane with an electrical failure might stop transmitting ADS-B out. Being able to identify planes via satellite is a whole separate capability.
[1] In all the planes I've flown, ADS-B is configured to transmit whenever the master electrical switch is turned on, but it can be configured to be turned on and off at will. See this video on a mid-air collision involving an eccentric character who liked to fly with ADS-B out turned off: https://youtu.be/G5y3JiOEnVs?si=rs5gNMurZ9ssUloS. If I recall correctly, he had his ADS-B wired to his nav lights so he could turn it on and off at will.
Sure, it can happen but these are edge cases. Space-based ADSB solves this problem with a fraction of the effort and much better data. Spooks might need this for military stuff, but for the bulk of planes, it doesn't make sense.
> Except as prohibited in [unmanned aircraft section], each person operating an aircraft equipped with ADS-B Out must operate this equipment in the transmit mode at all times unless [authorized by FAA or ATC].
A common way to add ADSB to an aircraft not originally equipped is replacing one of the lights with a uAvionics skyBeacon[2], which has a LED light + ADSB-out transmitter. So the nav light switch would control it, but you'd also now be required to have them on at all times.
[1]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/part-91/section-91.225...
What do you mean?
What I'm saying is that a lot of infrastructure is very vulnerable if there is someone who wants to cause damage. Hand grenades or improvised explosives on commercially available or even home-built drones can cause a lot of havoc, assuming you have the operators and they can avoid being tracked down. The Russian invasion of Ukraine shows the efficiency of that, at this point there must have been hundreds of thousands of drones been used to great (and financially asynchronous) effects, on both sides. What ends up in the news and social media is likely just the tip of the iceberg.
lol, as if you'd use satellite imagery for that and not just (freely) available data on airplane movement.
> assess the impacts of world events - such as the quantity of aircraft present for large sporting or entertainment events
wow, there were a hundred small airplanes in Las Vegas, there must have been an event there, who knew. Everyone knew and it's easily available information.
The application is military. That's the only thing this is good for. It's the only thing their screenshots show. Why not just say that.
Also military planes on active war missions don't broadcast ADS-B for obvious reasons. We do sometimes see them on training missions though. Most platforms block them but ADS-B Exchange doesn't.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenADSB/comments/kxrqi7/sat_adsc_t...
OTOH all the commercial and GA aircraft should be visible on sites like flightradar. Military aircraft require much more involved detection techniques, especially as many of them are designed to avoid detection.
They censor. You can pay to exclude yourself.
flightradar24 is still independent as far as I know. So I could see that.
Flightaware is owned by Rockwell Collins.
It also rules out most military planes! Including the B21 Raider stealth bomber and F35.
So that limits it pretty much exclusively to large cargo aircraft, large passenger aircraft, and large military transport aircraft.
This is not terribly useful for anything other than tracking military logistics but only the US does that by planes in any significant manner.
That >25m is a giant limit they just kind of walk right past.
Build small aircraft.