Open-Source Intelligence Analyst Spotted Russian Missile Test In Arctic (forbes.com) 22
An anonymous reader quotes Forbes:
U.S. Navy submarines have spent years shadowing Russian warships, hoping to snap photographs of missile tests through the periscope. It is the stuff of Cold War legends, taking intelligence, skill, courage and patience. Now by pure chance, a commercial satellite flying 488 miles above the Earth has captured exactly that. The unusual event took place in the Barents Sea, in Russia's arctic north. You can clearly see the yellow fireball as the missile erupts from its launch silo.
That the satellite captured the missile launch was freak chance. That open-source intelligence defense analyst Frank Bottema found it wasn't. Bottema and others have been watching Russia's Northern Fleet closely over recent weeks. They have racked up an impressive list of Russian Navy movements visible on free satellite imagery. Bottema found the missile test, 17 miles from the nearest land, because he knew where to look and what he was looking for.
You can see it for yourself on Sentinel Playground at grid coordinates 70.09378, 32.75932 (70Â 5'37.61"N, 32Â45'33.55"E) on July 23...
A Russian Navy press release on July 23 stated (in Russian) that the Udaloy-I Class destroyer Severomorsk had "carried out anti-aircraft fire as part of a test tactical exercise."
That the satellite captured the missile launch was freak chance. That open-source intelligence defense analyst Frank Bottema found it wasn't. Bottema and others have been watching Russia's Northern Fleet closely over recent weeks. They have racked up an impressive list of Russian Navy movements visible on free satellite imagery. Bottema found the missile test, 17 miles from the nearest land, because he knew where to look and what he was looking for.
You can see it for yourself on Sentinel Playground at grid coordinates 70.09378, 32.75932 (70Â 5'37.61"N, 32Â45'33.55"E) on July 23...
A Russian Navy press release on July 23 stated (in Russian) that the Udaloy-I Class destroyer Severomorsk had "carried out anti-aircraft fire as part of a test tactical exercise."
Hogwash (Score:3)
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Re: Hogwash (Score:1)
Re: Hogwash (Score:5, Informative)
Have you ever heard of RADAR?
I'm sure he has, but that is irrelevant. The question is whether, with hundreds of operating satellites, is there any time any which there is no satellite capable of observing. You don't need any special equipment to know where satellites are. They can't be hidden and the orbital elements of all satellites in low orbit, even the blackest of the blackety-black ones, are in public databases.
But there is no way for the Russians to hide missile launches. Can't be done. The U.S. has over-the-horizon radar coverage of the Barents Sea and will detect every launch no matter what, plus ELINT coverage. It they are concerned about optical coverage (probably not) then they would only seek to avoid the super-high resolution of U.S. reconnaissance satellites. They have little to fear from lower resolution commercial ones.
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Maybe launch them in bad weather?
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They have little to fear from lower resolution commercial ones.
Commercial satellite imagery is limited to 30 cm per pixel by law, not technology. DigitalGlobe has 30 cm resolution products for sale right now. Down from 50 cm, which was the previous legal limit. The NRO donated a couple of satellites they decided not to use to NASA in 2012. They were capable of approximately 10 cm per pixel. A bit old, at the time, but commercial isn't nearly as far off the state of the art as you might think, and is definitely exceeding the legal limit.
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What's more, even if they had managed to take into account the local passes even for the most menial of imaging capable satellites, I doubt they would have been aware of every sat's imaging schedule as well. It's not like they're all constantly capturing, and even if they were imaging at the time, the most likely scenario is that the swath of any standard imager would make it rather unlikely that that particular area were captured at the time. So it would have been one hell of a chance - if they see us, gre
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They would know that the launch itself would be detected by the US. If it was a large enough missile, they would have informed the US (and probably China) ahead of time. Why? The US has pretty much the entire world under Infrared observation from geostationary orbit. They can detect missile and rocket launches as part of the early warning system for nuclear attack. I don't know what the current ones are called, but it used to be the DSP satellites that did this.
That's how within a few days they knew that th
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I'm pretty sure it's not a large missile in the sense most people would take from the headline. As Russian press release makes clear, it's an air defense missile, i.e. a defensive measure against incoming missiles or aircraft. Not what an "early warning system for nuclear attack" is meant to detect. The only naval ship launching those kind of missiles would be a ballistic missile submarine (or test barge), not a destroyer whose missile armament will be either air defense missiles (against incoming missiles/
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There are a lot of satellites, however. Is it even possible to "time" something so that it cannot possibly be seen?
There are a lot of sensors on a lot of satellites with a lot of telemetry. However, even assuming that all countries and owners cooperated to send all telemetry from all satellites to a single database, finding something of interest in the midst of all that a bunch of bits is not trivial, even if it's theoretically possible.
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They probably wouldn't have written about it in a press release either.
Open source intelligence (Score:1)
Re:Open source intelligence (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Open source intelligence (Score:4, Insightful)
So what? (Score:2)
Why do we care? Did anyone think the Russians didn't do test firing of weapons?
LOL (Score:2)
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I wouldn't want to be on board an oil tanker while it was launching a missile. Things could get a bit toasty.
Otoh, if that was a tanker, and it wasn't launching a missile, then things had already gotten a bit toasty.
Money for schools, hospitals, pensions, etc. (Score:1)
The root of the problem is in our heads: racism, greed, stupidity, ignorance, and egoism.
Weapons Testing in the Arctic (Score:2)
Realistically, I appreciate that there is no way that public protest could stop Russia (or pretty much any country with an active military) from conducting weapons testing, or war games for that matter.
But the Arctic is (was) one of the few relatively un-spoiled areas of the planet where mankind's pollution hadn't wrecked the ecosystem.
If that test firing had failed, then even if Russian divers or a submersible had managed to retrieve the remains of the missile, there is a good chanc
The need for open source sensemaking tools (2010) (Score:2)
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
"In short, I feel open source tools for collaborative structured arguments, multiple perspective analysis, agent-based simulation, and so on, used together for making sense of what is going on in the world, are important to our democracy, security, and prosperity. Imagine if, instead of blog posts and comments on topics, we had searchable structured arguments about simulations and their results all with assumptions defined from different perspectives, where one could see at