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Would actually be quite impressive if it’s confirmed that NORAD is able to track and target a balloon/payload weighing between 11 grams-6 lbs, and flying betwee
by arwhatever 4y ago
Would actually be quite impressive if it’s confirmed that NORAD is able to track and target a balloon/payload weighing between 11 grams-6 lbs, and flying between 30k-40k feet altitude.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kylehotchkiss 4y agoI wouldn’t be surprised if they did; and the same sensitivity captures flocks of birds over the entire continent
- kragen 4y agoif it's metal foil or metallized foil it could have a quite large radar cross section, more so if it's carrying a corner reflector to make radar tracking easier
- cmsj 4y agoTherefore this is the start of open source stealth tech - hobbyists fearing military intervention will begin to construct their balloons out of radar-absorbing materials.
- kragen 4y agoor just radar-transparent materials, like polyethylene, like many existing balloons aluminum has real advantages though
- TkTech 4y agoMobile and fixed systems like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea-based_X-band_Radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea-based_X-band_Radar exist around the US and are reported to be able to pickup baseball sized objects from the other side of the continent (and that's what they claimed a decade ago before the upgrades). They're just typically not used with such precision because of the sheer amount of false positives they'd generate and how little concern there typically is about something so small.
- ben7799 4y agoI've seen that thing in Pearl Harbor.. pretty amazing. Navy guys claimed it could track a baseball in orbit.
- mywittyname 4y agoI suspect objects "in orbit" are some of the easiest objects to track. Once you have a few data points, you can pretty much calculate where it will be at any given point in time. It takes a lot of energy to meaningfully alter the course of an orbiting baseball, so much so that any attempt to do so would probably result in the operator now successfully tracking a debris cloud that used to be in the form of a baseball.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bagels 4y agoRadar can see cm scale objects in space. This is easy stuff.
- outworlder 4y ago> Would actually be quite impressive if it’s confirmed that NORAD is able to track and target a balloon/payload weighing between 11 grams-6 lbs, and flying between 30k-40k feet altitude. Is it really impressive? Modern stealth fighters have a radar signature smaller than small birds.
- kube-system 4y agoI would expect NORAD to have the best of the best... but there is a reason stealth planes are named as such.
- VWWHFSfQ 4y agoI don't think anyone really knows exactly the fidelity of what NORAD can see. And anyone on here that claims to know is almost definitely full of shit. But as Donald Rumsfeld famously said: "we can destroy a bomb placed under a pedestrian footbridge from 6,000 miles away without destroying the bridge." So really, who knows.
- CydeWeys 4y agoThe weight of the object doesn't matter though. All that matters is ita radar cross-section, which can be through the roof even from a one gram piece of metal foil (which would give it much more total radar cross-section than an entire F-35!).
- asdfadsfgfdda 4y agoIt's not just a passive payload, these targets have radio transmitters. So the task is probably easier.