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U-2 pilot's selfie above China's balloon taken over Missouri

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Re: U-2 pilot's selfie above China's balloon taken over Missouri

#151

Post by dogma1138 »

flangola7 wrote: post #112
mmaunder wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For RF SIGINT anything the ionosphere absorbs, scatters or reflects isn’t observable by satellites but may be from this balloon.

What could this balloon collect that any regular jet couldn't? I don't think the government is transmitting secrets over such a wide open medium. Anything broadcast over radio should be assumed to be public knowledge.

A jet is more conspicuous and arguably a bigger offense, China also does not have jets with the required range or service ceiling.

SIGINT is valuable even if you can’t decrypt the contents, in fact when you can it’s usually COMMINT.

SIGINT provides you with other valuable information such as frequencies used, cadence and also allows you to uncover new locations of forces and installations.

Also governments still use a lot of unencrypted or partially encrypted communications - cellphones are a great example even if voice and data is encrypted the cell ID and other valuable metadata isn’t.

Re: U-2 pilot's selfie above China's balloon taken over Missouri

#152

Post by flangola7 »

kube-system wrote: post #117
flangola7 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What could this balloon collect that any regular jet couldn't? I don't think the government is transmitting secrets over such a wide open medium. Anything broadcast over radio should be assumed to be public knowledge.

> Anything broadcast over radio should be assumed to be public knowledge. Are you suggesting that encryption is useless against a superpower? If that’s what you’re saying, the same applies to anything transmitted on a cable.

No I'm saying anything broadcast over such an easily intercepted medium is almost certainly not useful. (Either encrypted or information that is not secretive.)

If it really was a signal intelligence balloon, I don't see what it could possibly learn.

Re: U-2 pilot's selfie above China's balloon taken over Missouri

#153

Post by jki275 »

sokoloff wrote: post #16
cgb223 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the only picture of the balloon fully intact that exists The reason we sent a U2 Spy plane of all things after it is because it’s about the only plane we have still in service that can fly all the way up to 60,000 ft where the balloon was at the time

The F-15 can regularly climb over FL600 and, under special conditions, has exceeded 100K above MSL.

That was a specialty pre-production version of the F15 that was modified to do basically just altitude and speed records. It never entered operational service.

https://theaviationgeekclub.com/how-the-f-15-streak-eagle-br...

Re: U-2 pilot's selfie above China's balloon taken over Missouri

#154

Post by samstave »

mfkp wrote: post #141
snypher wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you finding these panels? Renogy is over $1/W and they have usually been price competitive

https://a1solarstore.com/solar-panels.html 370w panel for $266 (there's lots of good deals out there if you shop around). If you want to save more money and buy by the pallet (22 panels), they're around $182 each for 330w: https://sunelec.com/shop/solar-panels/suniva-330w-solar-pane...

Seems ripe to group-up and buy a pallet, but Ill take two. Now we just need another 20 to be bought...

What about getting the power ut of the panels? What kind of other kit is required to accomplish this? a transformer and marine batteries?

Re: U-2 pilot's selfie above China's balloon taken over Missouri

#155

Post by evan_ »

btilly wrote: post #103
evan_ wrote: post #27

Was this "selfie" literally taken handheld with a cell phone by the person in the shot? Surely they wouldn't bring personal phones into the cockpit- and wouldn't they be wearing gloves anyway?

The plane was at 70,000 feet, the balloon at 60,000. So that's about 2 miles below. My cellphone does not take photos that good from 2 miles away, how about yours? So no, not a cellphone. The U2 plane travels at about 500 mph and can't change that. (Look up "coffin corner" for why.) So even once you carefully place it to cast the shadow just right from 2 miles away, you have less than 0.2 seconds to get the photo wit…

I can photograph the ground from a commercial airplane window, so yes my phone can take pictures of things much further than 2 miles away. Distance from the subject isn’t really all that important provided it’s big enough, lit well and you can focus to infinity.

The timing is tricky but 2/10 of a second isn’t an unthinkably brief window for snapping a photo, and if you use burst capture it’s trivial.

Re: U-2 pilot's selfie above China's balloon taken over Missouri

#156

Post by samstave »

zamnos wrote: post #145
onepointsixC wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Supporting the spy angle is the pretty obvious connectivity (looks to be Ku-band satellite or similar) but it also doesn't really make that much sense... surely a satellite does what this does but better? China has no shortage of high quality spy satellites. Two things. It will be significantly better at ELINT, soaking up signals over which it floats. Second, at 60,000 feet it is at least an order of magnitude close…

This bears repeating. Physics dictates that atmosphere effects means a spy satellite, operating from the edge of space, will never be able to resolve the license plate of a car. A balloon, at 60,000 feet, roughly 18 km (space is at 100 km) can . If you're China, and you want high resolution aerial photography of US nuclear missile silos in Montana, this is what you'd use. We've been at the limit since the 70's, btw.…

If you point the JWT at the earth, can it see moar?

Re: U-2 pilot's selfie above China's balloon taken over Missouri

#157

Post by samstave »

prpl wrote: post #142
BenjiWiebe wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The satellites still have to take photos through the atmosphere. All of the atmosphere, in fact.

It's an optics problem. Most of the scattering when looking down is near the objects because that's where the turbulence and air density. Looking sideways has to go through all of that - it's dense, uniform, and turbulent in comparison to the atmosphere above a point. Another way to reframe this is that you would get a higher resolution looking at an object 100 miles down from space then you'd get looking at an equiv…

All of politics is an Optics Problem :-)

Re: U-2 pilot's selfie above China's balloon taken over Missouri

#158

Post by ClumsyPilot »

harles wrote: post #54
jpgvm wrote: post #30

Pretty interesting platform. Looks to have around 16x300W solar panels, so roughly 4.8KW. A lot but no unreasonable given it has 4 electric turbines and it would take a lot of grunt to influence a balloon of that size especially given air density altitude. If it is a civilian craft it's either government or maybe one of the big Chinese universities. Supporting the spy angle is the pretty obvious connectivity (looks t…

> surely a satellite does what this does but better? China has no shortage of high quality spy satellites. Maybe not. Satellites are highly predictable and things can be tucked neatly away when they’re known to be overhead.

Once you have ~50 satellites, what are you gonna do, tuck away things every 15 minutes?

Re: U-2 pilot's selfie above China's balloon taken over Missouri

#159

Post by samstave »

jonhohle wrote: post #80
jpgvm wrote: post #30

Pretty interesting platform. Looks to have around 16x300W solar panels, so roughly 4.8KW. A lot but no unreasonable given it has 4 electric turbines and it would take a lot of grunt to influence a balloon of that size especially given air density altitude. If it is a civilian craft it's either government or maybe one of the big Chinese universities. Supporting the spy angle is the pretty obvious connectivity (looks t…

> The platform alone has ~100k of solar on it I’m unfamiliar with solar panels in this application, but would each panel really be $6,250? That’s >20x premium over panels used for terrestrial application for use on a platform that would have little dynamic load.

>"would each panel really be $6,250"

In US taxpayer dollars maybe - but in CCCP money, its paid with slave blood, just like how Appl likes it.

Re: U-2 pilot's selfie above China's balloon taken over Missouri

#160

Post by samstave »

flangola7 wrote: post #112
mmaunder wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For RF SIGINT anything the ionosphere absorbs, scatters or reflects isn’t observable by satellites but may be from this balloon.

What could this balloon collect that any regular jet couldn't? I don't think the government is transmitting secrets over such a wide open medium. Anything broadcast over radio should be assumed to be public knowledge.

What do you think of this conspiracy theory thought:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34873156

-

HAARP [0] was built in 1993, and its often been accused of being able to incite tectonic response from the Earth. Obviously, this is the tinfoil... but for a couple decades HAARP has been blamed for earthquakes.

What I find interesting in this, is that with the "spy balloons", aside from the one which was shot down over the Atlantic, after 'passing through' Alaska and then across the US is supposedly "Chinese"...

The other balloons were shot down over Alaska, and over Billings.

Interestingly, both HAARP and the other balloons for weather tracking are from University Fairbanks. (and there has been a lot of posts recently for the strength of the Aurora - such as the super bright one yesterday from Alaska which made the entire night and snow glow strong green color)

Video from GeoEngineering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBt9rqXkcXo

-

>>"The resulting ionization and excitation of atmospheric constituents emit light of varying colour and complexity."

--

Now for the core of the conspiracy ; If HAARP can cause earthquakes through the interactions between the Ionosphere, or the beam pointing from bouncing waves off the Ionosphere, it would be interesting if that activity was being measured/tracked through the balloons that they use to measure aspects of the Ionosphere, and the blowing up of the balloons was to destroy the evidence of tracking and monitoring the effects of 3.6 Million Watt beams being shot up from multiple locations, and converging on the same point. Its interesting that we have Earthquake Lights - where the atmosphere above a major earthquake will light up the sky just prior to the EQ, kind of like sheet lightning, due to the changes in ionization. (and recall, there are treaties that were signed (supposedly) decades ago banning weather-warfare...

There was a 6.4 again in Turkey today, more building collapsed, but were apparently building that were already damaged in the previous.

So if we could look into the correlation between very strong Aurora, EQs, and when/if one of the HAARP installations was active at the time... (look at the wiki for the image of the activity bands:

https://i.imgur.com/D7xqMHK.png

Notice that "high activity" is the RED band, which is closest to Turkey's region... and then look at this path of the chinese balloon, which roughly follows the path of the bands in the Aurora output:

https://i.imgur.com/DocezpQ.png

---

There are also patents related to using HAARP to send ULF both into the atmosphere and into the ground... (see patents below)

So, I find it interesting to correlation (not causation) for massive geological event (a 1 in 1,000 year series of earthquakes in Turkey - in a swarm where typically each of the earthquakes by themselves would still be considered massive, and more than 60,000 people have died so far (the current official number claimed by MSM is 45,000 - but there are thousands who were recovered and buried without being added to the tally, as well as thousands of bodies that were pulverized and wont be discovered for a time, if at all)

I am not saying this is how it is, I am just saying I find all these coincidences odd...

Obviously turkey is basically bordered by tectonic boundaries ; the timing of everything is bizarre.

--

https://www.britannica.com/topic/HAARP

https://patents.google.com/patent/US8299936B2/en?q=(HAARP)&o...

https://patents.google.com/patent/US8115622B2/en?q=(HAARP)&o...

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