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Wouldn't that ship be bigger than the resolution of modern satellites photographing earth? So in conclusion, not all parts of the world are being monitored from

Wouldn't that ship be bigger than the resolution of modern satellites photographing earth? So in conclusion, not all parts of the world are being monitored from space, or at least nobody wants to admit to it?

InclinedPlane 11y ago
It is, but surveillance satellites do not and cannot image the entire earth regularly. They take pictures of comparatively small targeted areas on demand.
rtkwe 11y ago
You're partially right. The whole of the Earth isn't constantly monitored by the kind of satellites that could resolve this ship. However a lot of the high resolution satellites are in polar or nearly polar orbits so one satellite will see the whole Earth in a couple orbits. There's just not a need to collect and process all that information unless there's some reason to be looking at that chunk of land or sea. Generally they'd be focused on more pressing issues like monitoring other countries military bases instead of trying to find a mostly harmless ship in the North Atlantic. If there was some reason that this ship was an actual threat to countries like the US or Russia who have the large high resolution satellite networks in place it probably would have been found pretty quickly. There just wasn't a reason for the effort to be expended to look for it, the ship was old and being scrapped and wasn't full of anything particularly dangerous to worry any of the countries that could find it.
- grecy 11y ago
  >US or Russia who have the large high resolution satellite networks in place it probably would have been found pretty quickly Which makes me wonder about MH370. 1. Did a large country find it, but not want to divulge that because it would give away their "find stuff" capability. 2. Did the large countries try, but fail to find it, and obviously not divulge that because it would give away their inability to "find stuff" quickly 3. Did the large countries not even bother looking, because they have more important things to look at.
  - iSnow 11y ago
    I'd go with a combination of 1. and 3. Obviously, you'd need quite some budget to pay an analytics team to find a plane out in the ocean. You can't just conjure the money out of thin air. And if you go to your superiors and ask them for the money and have to admit it will disclose a lot of your capabilities to foreign powers, you'll likely simply get a resounding "NO". After all, it was never the question of rescuing living people with MH370. Did you notice how the US kept sat images and phone recordings extremely close to their chest in the case of MH17? I am pretty sure they have a lot more intelligence on that thing than they are willing to admit - they not having constant surveillance over a battle field in Europe would be extremely negligent.
  - rtkwe 11y ago
    Debris fields are a harder ask distinguishing the debris from MH370 from just the normal trash of the ocean. The ship has the benefit of being a large defined whole and we have a lot of info on other ships' and their location (though the tracking of ships is far from perfect it relies on them keeping their beacon on). It strikes me as a much harder problem to find MH370 because in order to resolve the debris they'd have to take very high res photos so it'd cover a very small area in one shot. So 2 & 3? They probably used some satellite imagery to look for large chunks but the effort to do the small survey was beyond what they were willing to expend without a better idea of where to search.
    - filoeleven 11y ago
      > the normal trash of the ocean What a depressing phrase.
  - leoedin 11y ago
    Finding things in the sea is basically a question of radar reflectivity and the search area. A ship in the north Atlantic? Its big flat steel sides reflect lots of radar signals, and the search area, while large, is (compared to the pacific and indian oceans) rather small. I don't doubt that anyone looking for this ship would find it fairly quickly. The problems with MH370 were twofold. One - initially nobody actually knew where it was. The search area was HUGE, and for the first few days there was much less information about the aircraft location. The eventual search area was selected based on quite detailed analysis of the satellite pings the aircraft sent. This took time. It took 9 days for the search to even start in the southern Indian Ocean. Even once they'd figured out roughly where it had gone down, the search area was still astronomically big. Two - aircraft wreckage isn't nearly as reflective to radar as a ship. An aluminium panel floating flat in the ocean will have a very similar reflection profile to the surrounding water. I think you need a fourth option. Large countries definitely have a technical advantage, but the military still has to obey the laws of physics. Large budgets and no legal restrictions probably put military technology a generation or two ahead of comparable civilian technology - it's better, but it's not magic.
ctdonath 11y ago
Zoom into the ocean with Google Maps/Earth. You'll see that away from land, the resolution plummets. Too much water surface, not enough reason for high detail.

InclinedPlane 11y ago

It is, but surveillance satellites do not and cannot image the entire earth regularly. They take pictures of comparatively small targeted areas on demand.

rtkwe 11y ago

You're partially right. The whole of the Earth isn't constantly monitored by the kind of satellites that could resolve this ship. However a lot of the high resolution satellites are in polar or nearly polar orbits so one satellite will see the whole Earth in a couple orbits. There's just not a need to collect and process all that information unless there's some reason to be looking at that chunk of land or sea. Generally they'd be focused on more pressing issues like monitoring other countries military bases instead of trying to find a mostly harmless ship in the North Atlantic. If there was some reason that this ship was an actual threat to countries like the US or Russia who have the large high resolution satellite networks in place it probably would have been found pretty quickly. There just wasn't a reason for the effort to be expended to look for it, the ship was old and being scrapped and wasn't full of anything particularly dangerous to worry any of the countries that could find it.

grecy 11y ago
>US or Russia who have the large high resolution satellite networks in place it probably would have been found pretty quickly Which makes me wonder about MH370. 1. Did a large country find it, but not want to divulge that because it would give away their "find stuff" capability. 2. Did the large countries try, but fail to find it, and obviously not divulge that because it would give away their inability to "find stuff" quickly 3. Did the large countries not even bother looking, because they have more important things to look at.
- iSnow 11y ago
  I'd go with a combination of 1. and 3. Obviously, you'd need quite some budget to pay an analytics team to find a plane out in the ocean. You can't just conjure the money out of thin air. And if you go to your superiors and ask them for the money and have to admit it will disclose a lot of your capabilities to foreign powers, you'll likely simply get a resounding "NO". After all, it was never the question of rescuing living people with MH370. Did you notice how the US kept sat images and phone recordings extremely close to their chest in the case of MH17? I am pretty sure they have a lot more intelligence on that thing than they are willing to admit - they not having constant surveillance over a battle field in Europe would be extremely negligent.
- rtkwe 11y ago
  Debris fields are a harder ask distinguishing the debris from MH370 from just the normal trash of the ocean. The ship has the benefit of being a large defined whole and we have a lot of info on other ships' and their location (though the tracking of ships is far from perfect it relies on them keeping their beacon on). It strikes me as a much harder problem to find MH370 because in order to resolve the debris they'd have to take very high res photos so it'd cover a very small area in one shot. So 2 & 3? They probably used some satellite imagery to look for large chunks but the effort to do the small survey was beyond what they were willing to expend without a better idea of where to search.
  - filoeleven 11y ago
    > the normal trash of the ocean What a depressing phrase.
- leoedin 11y ago
  Finding things in the sea is basically a question of radar reflectivity and the search area. A ship in the north Atlantic? Its big flat steel sides reflect lots of radar signals, and the search area, while large, is (compared to the pacific and indian oceans) rather small. I don't doubt that anyone looking for this ship would find it fairly quickly. The problems with MH370 were twofold. One - initially nobody actually knew where it was. The search area was HUGE, and for the first few days there was much less information about the aircraft location. The eventual search area was selected based on quite detailed analysis of the satellite pings the aircraft sent. This took time. It took 9 days for the search to even start in the southern Indian Ocean. Even once they'd figured out roughly where it had gone down, the search area was still astronomically big. Two - aircraft wreckage isn't nearly as reflective to radar as a ship. An aluminium panel floating flat in the ocean will have a very similar reflection profile to the surrounding water. I think you need a fourth option. Large countries definitely have a technical advantage, but the military still has to obey the laws of physics. Large budgets and no legal restrictions probably put military technology a generation or two ahead of comparable civilian technology - it's better, but it's not magic.

ctdonath 11y ago

Zoom into the ocean with Google Maps/Earth. You'll see that away from land, the resolution plummets. Too much water surface, not enough reason for high detail.