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Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps

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Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps

#161
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that’s an interesting idea. Anyone care to spin this up?

Is there a way to subscribe to comments? I'd love to see the result of this idea but am not savvy enough to spin it up myself very easily

Click the timestamp for the comment, then click "favorite", then set a reminder in your calendar to check your favorited comments (link in your profile).

Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps

#162
post #25

Screenshot for when it will have been deleted by Google https://i.imgur.com/toSC5a0.png .

Would be disappointing for them to remove it for basically no reason, especially considering you can see a B-2 parked on the tarmac ( https://www.google.com/maps/place/38%C2%B043'29.9%22N+93%C2%... ) in the nearby Whiteman AFB. The B-2 was first flown 32 years ago. Its existence is neither covert or secret, but often used to do flybys at freaking football games where thousands of recording devices are present and act…

I wouldn't expect it to get deleted for any kind of security reason... but it will get replaced, and possibly faster because there's a defect. Moving object artifacts are undesirable and make the image more difficult to use especially for automation (such as Google's registration). They tend to get knocked out automatically over time as the composition algorithms try to keep a neatly consistent scene. They may even be handled as clouds depending on which methods Google uses to avoid cloud cover. This is the same force that has slowly worked most alignment and registration marks out of Google imagery (for a long time aerial imagery usually contained registration marks etched into the camera optics), although you will still find them especially in areas that are more challenging to register by machine vision (deserts, etc).

Aircraft in Keyhole and Google Earth used to be extremely common before the composition methods improved and more imagery sources became available. You could just about make out the traffic pattern at some airports. You can still find them but they're much rarer today.

Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps

#163
post #51

There is a shadow of stealth bomber: https://goo.gl/maps/VWwtt1PbLJVkbiBS9 I'm curious... Will google delete it too?

Plane: 39.02177585879624, -93.59455907552 Shadow: 39.024670893611805, -93.60232594974401

I wonder what this can tell us about it's speed, altitude, etc.

Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps

#164
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's awesome.. I thought Army bases are masked on maps.

There's really no point. A few high sensitivity assets are lower resolution, but any state actor that wants very high resolution shots of military facilities already has it and on a quicker update cadence than google maps allows.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the biggest threat to domestic military facilities are foreign state actors but rather domestic terrorists, and those usually don't have access to any military-grade satellites.

Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps

#165
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, but don't misunderestimate the power of knowledge. Let's assume that some adversary is out there keeping track of these planes, and knows that they can scan Google maps for the RGB artifact by the engines to locate them reliably and programmatically. Now Google maps becomes a repository for information that adversary may use to validate other information. Maybe this confirms the schedule for some training ex…

Similar to how the president brings his own toilet when doing foreign visits so enemies can't analyze his poop to see what medicines he's taking or what medical conditions he has.

That would be some Gattaca level paranoia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca

Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps

#166

The aircraft seems to be a Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit. > The Northrop (later Northrop Grumman) B-2 Spirit, also known as the Stealth Bomber, is an American heavy strategic bomber, featuring low observable stealth technology designed for penetrating dense anti-aircraft defenses. Designed during the Cold War, it is a flying wing design with a crew of two.[1][3] The bomber is subsonic and can deploy both conventional a…

My father-in-law helped design the pilot seat for that. Unfortunately he was unable to make the transition to computer aided design. After the defense cutbacks in the 90s, he could only find minimum wage jobs for the rest of his working life.

In case anyone else is reading and thinking of that predicament, it needn't be a showstopper.

You have a couple of options:

You can do it the old way, and pay someone to convert it into the new way (I know a mechanical engineer who either sketches things or does 2D on a computer, and pays someone else to 3D it) which can then be sent to the client or manufacturer or whatever.

Or, if you're doing the whole product to sell, you can do it however you want, no one cares how their product was designed, just that the end product is good. I don't know how the housing on the monitor I'm looking at was designed, and I don't care, I just care that it's decent.

I feel like I count rant about this for a while, but all the "rules" change if you're taking clients or customers and not looking for FTE. It's got its own challenges, but with a few good / high paying clients, it's even easier than FTE, you can grow or not if you want.

Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps

#167
post #45

I live on a farm very close to this area. All the B-2s are based at nearby Whiteman Air Force Base. They fly over often -- one even fly over my farm today about an hour ago. This one was probably on final approach during the summer when the winds are usually out of the south and was probably about 2,000 feet above the ground.

Whiteman AFB is about 20 miles south and a little east of the plane in this image.

Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to how the president brings his own toilet when doing foreign visits so enemies can't analyze his poop to see what medicines he's taking or what medical conditions he has.

Kim Jong Un does that, but I can't find record of any other world leader doing so. That takes a special level of paranoia.

Can't find a source on the president doing that at the moment, but Stalin examined the poop of visiting leaders:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35427926

Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps

#169

Here is a stealth Bomber on the ground... https://maps.app.goo.gl/eJ2SU9SzE8D6JaZN9

Shouldn't military bases be blurred out on Google Maps?

Military adversaries have plenty of sources of their own imagery, and the commercial imagery industry is large and international. It's just not a tractable problem to try to keep people from obtaining good aerial imagery of military installations, and it's become fairly rare for anyone to try. We know that various military organizations have taken active measures to prevent imaging of sensitive activity (e.g. returning vehicles to same parking positions before passes of known IMINT satellites) but it's not a very easy thing to do, especially in the US which is heavily covered by both commercial and foreign satellites in various orbits like sun-synchronous and Molniya.1

Some military installations do receive a degree of protection by means of restricted airspace which mostly prevents commercial aerial imaging, meaning that only lower spatial resolution satellite images are available. But even this isn't really that common, and there's no systematic restriction on commercial imagery operators overflying military installations if airspace permits it.

Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps

#170

Interesting how the three separate R/G/B images are taken independently a few ~seconds~ milliseconds apart, with a different color filter placed over the image sensor. I assume this is to maximize resolution, since no Bayer interpolation [0] is needed to demosaic the output of a traditional image sensor that integrates the color filters onto the sensor pixels themselves. As these satellites are not intended to photog…

I grabbed my red and blue glasses because this vaguely looked like a 3D anaglyph to me, and while it's not the clearest such image, it definitely appears as a cohesive object hovering above a flat map. Further I zoom out, it definitely looks like it. Inadvertent byproduct of however this was photographed or stitched?
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