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A New Satellite Can Peer Inside Buildings, Day or Night

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Re: A New Satellite Can Peer Inside Buildings, Day or Night

#31

Post by artvark11 »

leoedin wrote: post #20
motohagiography wrote: post #9

In the 9ghz range, does that mean a sub-1mm wire mesh could mitigate this? Asking for a hypothetical house renovator friend. Thompson's adage of when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro suggests that the tinfoil hat crowd could be able to corner the emerging domestic Faraday cage market.

If you want to block SAR, just set up a big corner reflector near you. It'll completely blind the part of the image near you. It would also draw a lot of attention to you... So maybe not the best approach if you're trying to hide.

How big are we talking? Can I make one out of tinfoil?

Re: A New Satellite Can Peer Inside Buildings, Day or Night

#32

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

choeger wrote: post #30
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought tanks and infantry were already basically done against equiv-tech opponents. They are not sufficiently mobile to dodge the various smart weaponry we have available today.

Just look at the Syrian civil war or the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. In both cases, Russia deployed (various quantities of) conventional forces and overwhelmed their (more or less) equally equipped opponents with tanks, vehicles, and infantry by employing better organization, tactical and strategical mobility and, to some degree, air superiority. In both cases, live satellite images at the tactical level would h…

Hrm. I don't know enough about the exact makeup of those offenses, but it seems to me that Russia is at least a tier above the other two countries you mentioned in terms of military capability. Especially, it seems like Russia has much more ability to project power via long range guided weapons, and that Russia would be able to establish air superiority over the other two countries if they did try to take the fight to the sky.

Re: A New Satellite Can Peer Inside Buildings, Day or Night

#33

Post by craftinator »

leoedin wrote: post #20
motohagiography wrote: post #9

In the 9ghz range, does that mean a sub-1mm wire mesh could mitigate this? Asking for a hypothetical house renovator friend. Thompson's adage of when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro suggests that the tinfoil hat crowd could be able to corner the emerging domestic Faraday cage market.

If you want to block SAR, just set up a big corner reflector near you. It'll completely blind the part of the image near you. It would also draw a lot of attention to you... So maybe not the best approach if you're trying to hide.

Well, if enough people do it... Let's make a VPN for satellite surveillance

Re: A New Satellite Can Peer Inside Buildings, Day or Night

#34

Post by px43 »

leoedin wrote: post #19
px43 wrote: post #14

I'd bet someone could pretty easily build an alarm that goes off every time one of these things is looking at you. That radar blast has got to be massive. This definitely couldn't be a 24/7 thing from those satellites. I wonder how much radar time one of those things has before it needs to recharge/refuel.

Power usage isn't necessarily huge. I worked on a SAR satellite a few years ago with a total RF power of It's pulsed as well - you send an RF "chirp" at a sub-1kHz pulse frequency. Depending on imaging mode the average power draw is probably in the 500W-1kW range. That had a much larger resolution (6m rather than 50cm), but the resolution is a function of frequency and antenna design as much as power. The SAR concept…

Great info, much appreciated. Still seems like kind of a lot of something that's supposed to live in space for years at a time.

Presumably solar panels recharge a battery when it can, but continuous operations seem out of the question without some pretty large panels.

Maybe I'm underestimating modern solar panels or something.

Re: A New Satellite Can Peer Inside Buildings, Day or Night

#35

Post by roywiggins »

inakarmacoma wrote: post #29

Can you build one of these in a non-satellite form? Like, looking inside my computer or similar, or my closed closet?

Yes, and law enforcement buys these things. They can see through walls.

https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Radar-T...

Re: A New Satellite Can Peer Inside Buildings, Day or Night

#36

Post by grendelt »

lemonspat wrote: post #11
geomark wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also used to track submerged submarines by detecting ocean surface disturbances caused by the underwater wake of the submarine. Same benefits: works at night and through cloud cover.

That is astounding! something I was unaware about before. At what depth could it be measured?

Almost any depth. A big steel tube is going to displace water. Once you have some baseline measurements (of known underwater landforms), then small imperceptible variations would stick out.

Re: A New Satellite Can Peer Inside Buildings, Day or Night

#37

Post by grendelt »

kumarvvr wrote: post #25

The article itself says "some" buildings. Can anyone tell me if 9.65 GHz waves can penetrate concrete / wood homes? If commercial satellites have reached this capability, military ones are definitely far ahead.

Likely wood, concrete would probably attenuate a fair amount but still penetrate. Modern glass-walled office buildings with metallic coating for UV and thermal insulation would probably reflect or attenuate the signal enough to be unusable. Walls with metal lattice in them (plaster, stucco) might also be difficult to penetrate.

Re: A New Satellite Can Peer Inside Buildings, Day or Night

#38

Post by thesuitonym »

choeger wrote: post #12

Combine this technology with the launch cadence and pricing of SpaceX and the implications are astounding. First of all, security. If your opponent has that kind of capability, you cannot meaningfully deploy tanks or any other vehicles anymore. Even infantry will suffer massively once the resolution goes up a notch. On a much smaller level, one could easily detect brake-in attempts on unguarded property. Second, indu…

Doesn't even need to be as high profile as a space launch, we've had high altitude balloons that can do this for some time.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/02/pentagon-bal...

Re: A New Satellite Can Peer Inside Buildings, Day or Night

#40

Post by arkh »

> Another innovation, he says, is the resolution at which Capella’s satellites can collect imagery. Each pixel in one of the satellite’s images represents a 50-centimeter-by-50-centimeter square, while other SAR satellites on the market can only get down to around five meters. When it comes to actually discerning what you’re looking at from space, that makes a huge difference.

If that's what is available to civilians, I'd like to see what 2020 spy satellites can do.

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