Aircraft detection at planetary scale

Much more, but they don't want you (or "the enemy") to know how much they know. Of course, Trump "accidentally" revealed the US's sattelite imagery capability (https://www.npr.org/2022/11/18/1137474748/trump-tweeted-an-i...).

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.

> NSA SIGINT satellites

The antennas of satellites like USA-223 alone are so big that they could probably pick up wireless game controllers lmao

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-223

Their current best satellite in the constellation is the SuperDove and it takes images ~637 sq km at a time so, as a naive calculation, to cover the whole earth at any single instant you'd need over 800 thousand of Planet's SuperDove ignoring the difficulty of making a constellation that efficient and ignoring that you can also save a lot of birds by confining the area of interest to a narrower band of latitude without missing much activity. Your raw efficiency per satellite does take a small hit as you shrink the latitude coverage because you get a concentration of satellites along the edges but that's just orbital mechanics for you. (you can see this on the starlink constellation trackers, they're moderately denser right along the edge of the latitude band of their orbit: https://satellitemap.space/?norad=59877)

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.

Most planes broadcast their position via ADS-B while they are in the air. On land those are picked up by ground stations. For a long time we had bad coverage of planes at sea, but in part in response to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 the Iridium satellite network now also picks those signals up, giving us global coverage. The satellite coverage is limited to the frequencies used by airliners and business jets, but those are the ones we are most concerned with finding if they go down.

It would be much less costly to implement even wider spread use of ADS-B than already exists (down to very small size of aircraft), and increase the number of ADS-B receiving satellites in low earth orbit (which already exist, and intelligence agencies also have their own), than to attempt to do this in the strictly visual spectrum, based on frequent repeat visits of a particular few square km of sky imagery analysis (multiplied by the vast area of square km of sky that is the planet).

I don't think turning the Earth into a panopticon is worth the supposed benefits here.

Radar would probably work better, assuming that works through the atmosphere, and assuming it should act as a backup to ADS. That could work on ships as well, which also need to be tracked due to recent "accidental dragging of anchor" incidents.

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/307526/20240916/chinese-r...

There's no need for Google Lens. The image shows an LLM chat interface below the satallite imagery where the user is asking what significant events happened near Budapest airport on the capture date.

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?

It's not at all comparable. ADS-B is opt-in: you place an ADS-B out transmitter in your plane and turn it on to transmit your position [1]. You're perfectly free to turn your ADS-B off if you like. It's not even required for most of the US, so some planes may not have it installed (ADS-B out is only required within 30 nautical miles of a Class B airport [big airport], inside Class C airspace [medium-size airport], or in Class A airspace [18,000 ft above sea level]).

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.

Authentication? ADSB isn’t authenticated. Anyone can emit, anyone can spoof, and I probably shouldn’t say that over the wire. The FAA said in 2012, when the conf at Defcon was made, that it had its own secret mitigation.

I was wondering about that too. They can only detect aircraft with wingspans over 25 m, so most fighter jets (and also GA aircraft) are too small. Large commercial aircraft can be much better located (and identified!) via ADS-B. So that doesn't leave a lot of aircraft (bombers, tankers, AWACS and other larger military aircraft) for which this is useful.

Mentioning the military might give you a hint...

Search YouTube for videos of Ukrainian drones striking Russian military aircraft on airfields. One reason not to attempt this is that it would be seen as an attack.

Nothing except existing anti-drone measures around airports, e.g. radar, jammers, anti-drone drones, and eagles (https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-35750816).

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.

If you are using a quadcopter you are probably close enough to control the drone directly.

I mean what's stopping anyone right now? All the tools are there and readily available, it's just that most people don't really want to go to jail for a long time.

Not only military. Commercial transport aircraft can bring things in anticipation of an event not yet publicly announced, or such that won't ever be announced. Same applies even to Vegas: a dozen additional private aircraft may bring people to an invite-only event, which none of them is going to publicize.

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.

While I broadly agree, I think the era of general freely available data such as aircraft movements is about to end. We're entering an era of siloes.

Is there freely available data on commercial & private airplane movement in India, China, and Russia? I'd be very surprised by that.

This would have applications for police for detecting unauthorized activities such as smuggling or movements of agriculture planes (chemical spraying) on private airfields. Assuming the planes are >25m.

Framed this way, it seems obvious that drones and UAV would arise out of this "evolutionary pressure" on aircraft.

Of course, if you have more satellites or faster imaging speeds you can use higher resolution images.

When, precisely, did the US stop doing that?

The US Air Force has developed, tested, and is now in early production of the B-21, a long-range stealth bomber, one of their most important projects.

B-52 is still very much active. As for stealth, B-2.

Like B21?

You mean the long range stealth bombers that are parked in enclosed hangars when not in operation?

Nonsense, spy sattelites were a thing when that program was developed. Even now it's pretty difficult for a sattelite to reliably spot, let alone track a flying airplane. (I'm making this up by the way, I have no sources or information and if any side did have sattelites with that capability, they wouldn't tell anyone)

Aren't they just waiting for the active camouflaging technology to catch up? Normally, we think about that as something on the underside of the aircraft so that it appears invisible from the ground... but the same principle could apply to the top side of the aircraft if it ever becomes viable.