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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

#161

Post by ClumsyPilot »

lightedman wrote: post #51
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?" Nope, which is why Google and Apple pay heavily for on-the-ground recording and aerial photography for their maps.

Have you seen what civilian imaging satellites look like? They have giant optics the size of a bus. Look at Worldview 3

Even optics 1/10 the size of Worldview would be massive, and this baloon has nothing like it.

What is it using, a GoPro?

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

#162

Post by ClumsyPilot »

testTED wrote: post #102
jvanderbot wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cell phone snooping they say, but that seems easier from the ground.

How?

Buy an apartment in some Highrise for best reception. Anonymously register it to a shell company based in a tax heaven. UV Gov will think this is 'legal' tax evasion just like thousands of landlords.

Put any equipment you want inside generic chest on a balcony.

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

#163

Post by kube-system »

flangola7 wrote: post #152
kube-system wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Encryption makes signals intelligence more difficult, not impossible. It is and has always been a game of cat and mouse.

There is still a lot you can learn from analyzing encrypted signals. The metadata itself may be quite valuable, and any world power undoubtedly does cryptanalysis.

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

#164

Post by prpl »

samstave wrote: post #157
prpl wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

Funny you mention that because Trump gave away USA-224’s optics capability. You can understand from that photo the kind of resolution you can get from space (during the middle of the day, in August, in a desert - no less).

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

#165

Post by testTED »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #162
testTED wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How?

Buy an apartment in some Highrise for best reception. Anonymously register it to a shell company based in a tax heaven. UV Gov will think this is 'legal' tax evasion just like thousands of landlords. Put any equipment you want inside generic chest on a balcony.

[flagged]

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

#166

Post by justin66 »

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…

> The plane was at 70,000 feet, the balloon at 60,000.

It was quite a bit closer. Just look at the sizes of various things in that photograph (the length of the plane's shadow vs. the length of the wingtip, both those vs the diameter of the balloon, etc.). If you read 70,000 somewhere, that's because they were quoting the plane's service ceiling.

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

#167

Post by thewileyone »

imiric wrote: post #138

Cool photo, but it's ironic that an alleged spy balloon is being monitored from a spy plane. There's public outcry over China spying on the US, yet this same plane has been used to spy on many other countries for decades now. It's much more sophisticated, and not even state-of-the-art anymore. This whole story feels sensationalized, and like a diversion tactic.

I made the same point about the U2 as well. Such irony and hypo-criticism.

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

#168

Post by mulmen »

foofoo55 wrote: post #46
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-22 service ceiling is 60,000 ft so it can get up there too. The U2, however, flies relatively slow ( I would think that the U2 internal cameras were designed for a long focal length and for objects below the aircraft. I wonder if they made modifications for balloon photos.

The U2 contains a far more advanced sensor suite than just cameras. With something like this balloon I suspect the signals intelligence is at least as interesting as any visual reconnaissance.

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

#169

Post by Breza »

samstave wrote: post #156
zamnos wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Good question. The answer is no for three primary reasons. First, the JWST isn't designed for observing Earth, so its equipment isn't optimized for that purpose. Second, spy sats are already at the limits of what physics will allow them to see. And third, the JWST is much farther from our planet than spy sats. The atmosphere blurs signals.

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

#170

Post by Breza »

kube-system wrote: post #163
flangola7 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Encryption makes signals intelligence more difficult, not impossible. It is and has always been a game of cat and mouse. There is still a lot you can learn from analyzing encrypted signals. The metadata itself may be quite valuable, and any world power undoubtedly does cryptanalysis.

Wouldn't there also be a benefit from knowing, for example, that there's a bunch of encrypted radio chatter on a military frequency coming from a rural Montana town with a population of 500? Even without knowing anything that's being said, it might indicate a military presence in that location.
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