Good read. Sounds like an ideal system to boost to a molniya orbit.
Quote from: kevin-rf on 05/17/2016 01:17 amGood read. Sounds like an ideal system to boost to a molniya orbit.I think this ended up as part of the CANYON mission. If I remember correctly, CANYON had a slightly inclined orbit that allowed it to slowly move in and out of the line of sight of microwave transmitters and suck up their signals.
Quote from: Blackstar on 05/17/2016 01:47 amQuote from: kevin-rf on 05/17/2016 01:17 amGood read. Sounds like an ideal system to boost to a molniya orbit.I think this ended up as part of the CANYON mission. If I remember correctly, CANYON had a slightly inclined orbit that allowed it to slowly move in and out of the line of sight of microwave transmitters and suck up their signals.Curious that the name CANYON is still classified long after optical reconnaissance payloads that are far newer have been fully declassified.
Quote from: Star One on 05/17/2016 08:31 amQuote from: Blackstar on 05/17/2016 01:47 amQuote from: kevin-rf on 05/17/2016 01:17 amGood read. Sounds like an ideal system to boost to a molniya orbit.I think this ended up as part of the CANYON mission. If I remember correctly, CANYON had a slightly inclined orbit that allowed it to slowly move in and out of the line of sight of microwave transmitters and suck up their signals.Curious that the name CANYON is still classified long after optical reconnaissance payloads that are far newer have been fully declassified.Not really if you consider their policy. They have treated the sigint stuff more seriously than the photo stuff. For instance, they declassified Corona in 1995 and GRAB in 1998, but even after declassifying GRAB, they only released minimal information on it. They have treated high altitude sigint as more sensitive than low altitude sigint.And for all of this stuff their general rule of thumb seems to be that they won't even consider declassifying a program until at least 25 years after the program ceased producing data. The last CANYON as launched in 1977. If it operated for 10 years they would not even have started considering declassifying it until 2013.
I wonder where radar reconnaissance falls in the general scheme of things on classification as like optical reconnaissance you do see civilian equivalents with radar earth resources satellites.
I would argue that understanding what optical satellites do is pretty straight forward. SIGINT is not, and the reason they are dragging feet as much as possible is telling how they work lets people understand and counter it. You kind of know if something can or can not be seen from space and if you should or could hide it ... but if you don't know something is emitting critical data, you can not mask it. For instance in the case of DONKEY, you have to be pretty sophisticated to understand a Rose plot and realize that a point to point antenna like that is actually exploitable from space.
Would you say your explanation is also applicable to radar reconnaissance as well?
Quote from: Star One on 05/17/2016 05:06 pmWould you say your explanation is also applicable to radar reconnaissance as well?Who knows. RADAR comes in so many forms. Remember one of the arguments against QUILL was you where no longer passively attempting to acquire information. Pointing a RADAR beam at someone can be construed as an aggressive act. It also tells someone on the ground that you are interested in them. Passive systems, like optical and SIGINT do not give themselves away like that. You have to assume if the satellite is in the sky, it is looking at you. Here is a fun one, old analog systems swept a beam across the target (unless they locked on to it) at regular intervals. The AESA beam can be randomly pointed at different locations in it's field of view at any point in time. That means instead of getting a repeating blip at a set interval you can query an object of interest at random intervals with just enough power to return the information you desire while steering the beam away from areas that you do not want it to query. AKA a stealthy sweep, that may not be picked up, or just ignored as spurious noise... It was one of the things talked about in some of the av week articles on the "RQ-180", what ever that really is.
What was so special about the antenna shape?
Earlier versions where a round dish, the newer model was a flat rectangular plate. AKA some sort of phased array antennae.
I wonder if that accounts for its so called disappearing trick that satellite observers have noticed over the years.