7 ms·

Aircraft detection at planetary scale

96 points by jjwiseman 2y ago

yimby2001 2y ago
If you were wondering why the US stopped bothering with long range stealth bombers
- morkalork 2y ago
  Like B21?
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  When, precisely, did the US stop doing that?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  Aren't they just waiting for the active camouflaging technology to catch up? Normally, we think about that as something on the underside of the aircraft so that it appears invisible from the ground... but the same principle could apply to the top side of the aircraft if it ever becomes viable.
  - NitpickLawyer 2y ago
    That would only be relevant to commercial-based optical spectrum providers. Gov mils have SAR (Synthetic-aperture radar) capabilities that would render that moot.
    - 15155 2y ago
      Can SAR penetrate steel hangar roofs now?
- mmooss 2y ago
  The US Air Force has developed, tested, and is now in early production of the B-21, a long-range stealth bomber, one of their most important projects.
- TrackerFF 2y ago
  B-52 is still very much active. As for stealth, B-2.
- 15155 2y ago
  You mean the long range stealth bombers that are parked in enclosed hangars when not in operation?
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Nonsense, spy sattelites were a thing when that program was developed. Even now it's pretty difficult for a sattelite to reliably spot, let alone track a flying airplane. (I'm making this up by the way, I have no sources or information and if any side did have sattelites with that capability, they wouldn't tell anyone)
baxtr 2y ago
> After significant experimentation with many different model architectures, we determined that aircraft <25m in length or wingspan are too small to be reliably detected in medium resolution imagery, so we elected to focus on aircraft this size or greater. Build small aircraft.
- tuanx5 2y ago
  Framed this way, it seems obvious that drones and UAV would arise out of this "evolutionary pressure" on aircraft.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- tehjoker 2y ago
  Of course, if you have more satellites or faster imaging speeds you can use higher resolution images.
4ndrewl 2y ago
TFA doesn't really explain how is this better/cheaper than existing ADSB based technologies, or where one is more appropriate than the other (ie which use cases it's targeting)?
- eastbound 2y ago
  Authentication? ADSB isn’t authenticated. Anyone can emit, anyone can spoof, and I probably shouldn’t say that over the wire. The FAA said in 2012, when the conf at Defcon was made, that it had its own secret mitigation.
  - 4ndrewl 2y ago
    Agree on ADSB, but couldnt you spoof this using paint or 1:1 scale cardboard aircraft?
  - Scoundreller 2y ago
    Getting the Doppler shift right against multiple receivers would be physically impossible (If you’re not travelling at the right speed of course)
- orbital-decay 2y ago
  Mentioning the military might give you a hint...
  - 4ndrewl 2y ago
    I mean, commercial services do filter out mil adsb, but they are out there and available. So the use case is tracking movements of military aircraft?
    - traverseda 2y ago
      Not all military planes are going to actually have ADSB, obviously. Also even the unfiltered stream requires an ADSB receiver somewhere.
barbazoo 2y ago
> On the commercial side, understanding how many aircraft landed in a city on a specific day can help predict economic trends lol, as if you'd use satellite imagery for that and not just (freely) available data on airplane movement. > assess the impacts of world events - such as the quantity of aircraft present for large sporting or entertainment events wow, there were a hundred small airplanes in Las Vegas, there must have been an event there, who knew. Everyone knew and it's easily available information. The application is military. That's the only thing this is good for. It's the only thing their screenshots show. Why not just say that.
- closewith 2y ago
  While I broadly agree, I think the era of general freely available data such as aircraft movements is about to end. We're entering an era of siloes.
  - cle 2y ago
    I agree with your conclusion, but I'm really curious to know your reasons & predictions here. Can you elaborate?
    - cma 2y ago
      The DOGE guy doesn't like it because people were tracking his plane and he also happens to be replacing FAA stuff with his starlink (which deorbits every 4 years and now will have more govt propping it up and guaranteeing redeployments, if the military stuff didn't already do that).
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    As long as I can stick a 1090 MHz ADS-B antenna on my roof and listen to transponders as they pass overhead (which I currently do), at least some data will be out there.
    - neilv 2y ago
      If your locale were to escalate to wartime-like measures for some reason (because of real threats, or some crazy/rogue leadership), couldn't recording aircraft movements and transmissions be suspicious, and sharing that data be suspected spying/treason?
patapong 2y ago
I wonder what it would take to do this for in-flight aircraft? I.e. simultaneously surveying the entire sky and tracking all aircraft in flight? This could allow finding downed aircraft much more quickly. Would a megaconstellation like starlink with cameras suffice?
- rtkwe 2y ago
  Their current best satellite in the constellation is the SuperDove and it takes images ~637 sq km at a time so, as a naive calculation, to cover the whole earth at any single instant you'd need over 800 thousand of Planet's SuperDove ignoring the difficulty of making a constellation that efficient and ignoring that you can also save a lot of birds by confining the area of interest to a narrower band of latitude without missing much activity. Your raw efficiency per satellite does take a small hit as you shrink the latitude coverage because you get a concentration of satellites along the edges but that's just orbital mechanics for you. (you can see this on the starlink constellation trackers, they're moderately denser right along the edge of the latitude band of their orbit: https://satellitemap.space/?norad=59877 https://satellitemap.space/?norad=59877) Now if we reduce the time resolution somewhat and accept we may not know at the exact moment where any particular plane is but that it will get captured on a satellite every X minutes you can really start cutting into those numbers.
- simulator5g 2y ago
  I don't think turning the Earth into a panopticon is worth the supposed benefits here.
  - Physkal 2y ago
    Did not know about this prison design, looks like they were all implemented poorly lead to it's decline in usage?
    - tokai 2y ago
      Its not about the prison, but about the metaphor.
- 2y ago
amelius 2y ago
They should look into how this can be combined with established radar-based aircraft tracking techniques, e.g. Kalman filtering.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  https://www.techtimes.com/articles/307526/20240916/chinese-researchers-use-starlink-detect-stealth-aircraft-still-ready-militarization.htm https://www.techtimes.com/articles/307526/20240916/chinese-r...
randomNumber7 2y ago
What would stop anyone from putting this on a quadcopter to deliver payloads to parking planes?
- Etheryte 2y ago
  I mean what's stopping anyone right now? All the tools are there and readily available, it's just that most people don't really want to go to jail for a long time.
- nine_k 2y ago
  Search YouTube for videos of Ukrainian drones striking Russian military aircraft on airfields. One reason not to attempt this is that it would be seen as an attack.
- GaggiX 2y ago
  If you are using a quadcopter you are probably close enough to control the drone directly.
  - notahacker 2y ago
    Yeah. And even if you're not, a coordinate for the airport location and a camera with a basic computer vision system capable of identifying the difference between tarmac and aircraft is going to be more useful than a real time link to satellite images
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Nothing except existing anti-drone measures around airports, e.g. radar, jammers, anti-drone drones, and eagles (https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-35750816 https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-35750816). What I'm saying is that a lot of infrastructure is very vulnerable if there is someone who wants to cause damage. Hand grenades or improvised explosives on commercially available or even home-built drones can cause a lot of havoc, assuming you have the operators and they can avoid being tracked down. The Russian invasion of Ukraine shows the efficiency of that, at this point there must have been hundreds of thousands of drones been used to great (and financially asynchronous) effects, on both sides. What ends up in the news and social media is likely just the tip of the iceberg.
paganel 2y ago
For those curious/wondering, the last satellite image is of the Budapest International Airport [1], a reverse Google Lens image search was surprisingly good at finding it. [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@47.4343334,19.2735672,4635m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDMxOS4yIKXMDSoJLDEwMjExNDUzSAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/@47.4343334,19.2735672,4635m/dat...
- chatmasta 2y ago
  There's no need for Google Lens. The image shows an LLM chat interface below the satallite imagery where the user is asking what significant events happened near Budapest airport on the capture date. That said: it's actually fascinating that Google Lens found that so quickly. I guess there are many overhead photos of airports, and each airport has a relatively distinct shape?
  - paganel 2y ago
    > LLM chat interface below the satellite imagery I subconsciously block anything LLM-chat related by default, just as I do with ads. I tried looking through a source of that photo in the text above, text which seemed less AI-coded, but wasn't lucky (or I didn't know where to look). > it's actually fascinating that Google Lens found that so quickly It's one of their (relatively few) most recent successes, yes, of which not that many tech people are talking about. Or at least I haven't seen it discussed on forums like this one. For example it's also particularly good at image finding locations based on pieces of architecture seen in the photo backgrounds, let's say part of a church, a mayor's office, stuff like that. Being able to google lens whatever can be seen of a gothic-like cathedral in the background of a photo and getting the name of the cathedral and of the city itself almost instantly is some CSI-level stuff, again, a rare win for public-facing tech these days.
walrus01 2y ago
Just consider: If a private, for-profit company that sells public imagery is publishing this openly, what capabilities does the NRO have that synthesize data from SAR radar-specialized satellites, visual spectrum camera satellites, infrared-band specialized sensing satellites, and possibly NSA SIGINT satellites that capture emissions from aircraft traffic?
- preisschild 2y ago
  > NSA SIGINT satellites The antennas of satellites like USA-223 alone are so big that they could probably pick up wireless game controllers lmao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-223 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-223
  - walrus01 2y ago
    If we take the maximum size of geostationary publicly known commercial telecom satellite that's ever been launched as a reference, and what vehicle they launched on, it's probably in the range of 6000-8000kg total mass, including its expected lifespan of stationkeeping propellant.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Much more, but they don't want you (or "the enemy") to know how much they know. Of course, Trump "accidentally" revealed the US's sattelite imagery capability (https://www.npr.org/2022/11/18/1137474748/trump-tweeted-an-image-from-a-spy-satellite-declassified-document-shows https://www.npr.org/2022/11/18/1137474748/trump-tweeted-an-i...). I think once the Ukraine war is over, maybe in years to come, the impact of US intelligence will become fully clear. I'm fairly sure it was due to US intelligence on the location of Russian ships like the Moskva that they were taken out, and that doesn't even need particularly high resolution cameras.
  - herewulf 2y ago
    And that's a six year old image. Imagine the state of the art in 2025.

96 points by jjwiseman 2y ago

yimby2001 2y ago

If you were wondering why the US stopped bothering with long range stealth bombers

morkalork 2y ago
Like B21?
dragonwriter 2y ago
When, precisely, did the US stop doing that?
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
Aren't they just waiting for the active camouflaging technology to catch up? Normally, we think about that as something on the underside of the aircraft so that it appears invisible from the ground... but the same principle could apply to the top side of the aircraft if it ever becomes viable.
- NitpickLawyer 2y ago
  That would only be relevant to commercial-based optical spectrum providers. Gov mils have SAR (Synthetic-aperture radar) capabilities that would render that moot.
  - 15155 2y ago
    Can SAR penetrate steel hangar roofs now?
mmooss 2y ago
The US Air Force has developed, tested, and is now in early production of the B-21, a long-range stealth bomber, one of their most important projects.
TrackerFF 2y ago
B-52 is still very much active. As for stealth, B-2.
15155 2y ago
You mean the long range stealth bombers that are parked in enclosed hangars when not in operation?
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Nonsense, spy sattelites were a thing when that program was developed. Even now it's pretty difficult for a sattelite to reliably spot, let alone track a flying airplane. (I'm making this up by the way, I have no sources or information and if any side did have sattelites with that capability, they wouldn't tell anyone)

baxtr 2y ago

> After significant experimentation with many different model architectures, we determined that aircraft <25m in length or wingspan are too small to be reliably detected in medium resolution imagery, so we elected to focus on aircraft this size or greater. Build small aircraft.

tuanx5 2y ago
Framed this way, it seems obvious that drones and UAV would arise out of this "evolutionary pressure" on aircraft.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tehjoker 2y ago
Of course, if you have more satellites or faster imaging speeds you can use higher resolution images.

4ndrewl 2y ago

TFA doesn't really explain how is this better/cheaper than existing ADSB based technologies, or where one is more appropriate than the other (ie which use cases it's targeting)?

eastbound 2y ago
Authentication? ADSB isn’t authenticated. Anyone can emit, anyone can spoof, and I probably shouldn’t say that over the wire. The FAA said in 2012, when the conf at Defcon was made, that it had its own secret mitigation.
- 4ndrewl 2y ago
  Agree on ADSB, but couldnt you spoof this using paint or 1:1 scale cardboard aircraft?
- Scoundreller 2y ago
  Getting the Doppler shift right against multiple receivers would be physically impossible (If you’re not travelling at the right speed of course)
orbital-decay 2y ago
Mentioning the military might give you a hint...
- 4ndrewl 2y ago
  I mean, commercial services do filter out mil adsb, but they are out there and available. So the use case is tracking movements of military aircraft?
  - traverseda 2y ago
    Not all military planes are going to actually have ADSB, obviously. Also even the unfiltered stream requires an ADSB receiver somewhere.

barbazoo 2y ago

> On the commercial side, understanding how many aircraft landed in a city on a specific day can help predict economic trends lol, as if you'd use satellite imagery for that and not just (freely) available data on airplane movement. > assess the impacts of world events - such as the quantity of aircraft present for large sporting or entertainment events wow, there were a hundred small airplanes in Las Vegas, there must have been an event there, who knew. Everyone knew and it's easily available information. The application is military. That's the only thing this is good for. It's the only thing their screenshots show. Why not just say that.

closewith 2y ago
While I broadly agree, I think the era of general freely available data such as aircraft movements is about to end. We're entering an era of siloes.
- cle 2y ago
  I agree with your conclusion, but I'm really curious to know your reasons & predictions here. Can you elaborate?
  - cma 2y ago
    The DOGE guy doesn't like it because people were tracking his plane and he also happens to be replacing FAA stuff with his starlink (which deorbits every 4 years and now will have more govt propping it up and guaranteeing redeployments, if the military stuff didn't already do that).
- ryandrake 2y ago
  As long as I can stick a 1090 MHz ADS-B antenna on my roof and listen to transponders as they pass overhead (which I currently do), at least some data will be out there.
  - neilv 2y ago
    If your locale were to escalate to wartime-like measures for some reason (because of real threats, or some crazy/rogue leadership), couldn't recording aircraft movements and transmissions be suspicious, and sharing that data be suspected spying/treason?

patapong 2y ago

I wonder what it would take to do this for in-flight aircraft? I.e. simultaneously surveying the entire sky and tracking all aircraft in flight? This could allow finding downed aircraft much more quickly. Would a megaconstellation like starlink with cameras suffice?

rtkwe 2y ago
Their current best satellite in the constellation is the SuperDove and it takes images ~637 sq km at a time so, as a naive calculation, to cover the whole earth at any single instant you'd need over 800 thousand of Planet's SuperDove ignoring the difficulty of making a constellation that efficient and ignoring that you can also save a lot of birds by confining the area of interest to a narrower band of latitude without missing much activity. Your raw efficiency per satellite does take a small hit as you shrink the latitude coverage because you get a concentration of satellites along the edges but that's just orbital mechanics for you. (you can see this on the starlink constellation trackers, they're moderately denser right along the edge of the latitude band of their orbit: https://satellitemap.space/?norad=59877 https://satellitemap.space/?norad=59877) Now if we reduce the time resolution somewhat and accept we may not know at the exact moment where any particular plane is but that it will get captured on a satellite every X minutes you can really start cutting into those numbers.
simulator5g 2y ago
I don't think turning the Earth into a panopticon is worth the supposed benefits here.
- Physkal 2y ago
  Did not know about this prison design, looks like they were all implemented poorly lead to it's decline in usage?
  - tokai 2y ago
    Its not about the prison, but about the metaphor.
2y ago

amelius 2y ago

They should look into how this can be combined with established radar-based aircraft tracking techniques, e.g. Kalman filtering.

toomuchtodo 2y ago
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/307526/20240916/chinese-researchers-use-starlink-detect-stealth-aircraft-still-ready-militarization.htm https://www.techtimes.com/articles/307526/20240916/chinese-r...

randomNumber7 2y ago

What would stop anyone from putting this on a quadcopter to deliver payloads to parking planes?

Etheryte 2y ago
I mean what's stopping anyone right now? All the tools are there and readily available, it's just that most people don't really want to go to jail for a long time.
nine_k 2y ago
Search YouTube for videos of Ukrainian drones striking Russian military aircraft on airfields. One reason not to attempt this is that it would be seen as an attack.
GaggiX 2y ago
If you are using a quadcopter you are probably close enough to control the drone directly.
- notahacker 2y ago
  Yeah. And even if you're not, a coordinate for the airport location and a camera with a basic computer vision system capable of identifying the difference between tarmac and aircraft is going to be more useful than a real time link to satellite images
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Nothing except existing anti-drone measures around airports, e.g. radar, jammers, anti-drone drones, and eagles (https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-35750816 https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-35750816). What I'm saying is that a lot of infrastructure is very vulnerable if there is someone who wants to cause damage. Hand grenades or improvised explosives on commercially available or even home-built drones can cause a lot of havoc, assuming you have the operators and they can avoid being tracked down. The Russian invasion of Ukraine shows the efficiency of that, at this point there must have been hundreds of thousands of drones been used to great (and financially asynchronous) effects, on both sides. What ends up in the news and social media is likely just the tip of the iceberg.

paganel 2y ago

For those curious/wondering, the last satellite image is of the Budapest International Airport [1], a reverse Google Lens image search was surprisingly good at finding it. [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@47.4343334,19.2735672,4635m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDMxOS4yIKXMDSoJLDEwMjExNDUzSAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/@47.4343334,19.2735672,4635m/dat...

chatmasta 2y ago
There's no need for Google Lens. The image shows an LLM chat interface below the satallite imagery where the user is asking what significant events happened near Budapest airport on the capture date. That said: it's actually fascinating that Google Lens found that so quickly. I guess there are many overhead photos of airports, and each airport has a relatively distinct shape?
- paganel 2y ago
  > LLM chat interface below the satellite imagery I subconsciously block anything LLM-chat related by default, just as I do with ads. I tried looking through a source of that photo in the text above, text which seemed less AI-coded, but wasn't lucky (or I didn't know where to look). > it's actually fascinating that Google Lens found that so quickly It's one of their (relatively few) most recent successes, yes, of which not that many tech people are talking about. Or at least I haven't seen it discussed on forums like this one. For example it's also particularly good at image finding locations based on pieces of architecture seen in the photo backgrounds, let's say part of a church, a mayor's office, stuff like that. Being able to google lens whatever can be seen of a gothic-like cathedral in the background of a photo and getting the name of the cathedral and of the city itself almost instantly is some CSI-level stuff, again, a rare win for public-facing tech these days.

walrus01 2y ago

Just consider: If a private, for-profit company that sells public imagery is publishing this openly, what capabilities does the NRO have that synthesize data from SAR radar-specialized satellites, visual spectrum camera satellites, infrared-band specialized sensing satellites, and possibly NSA SIGINT satellites that capture emissions from aircraft traffic?

preisschild 2y ago
> NSA SIGINT satellites The antennas of satellites like USA-223 alone are so big that they could probably pick up wireless game controllers lmao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-223 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-223
- walrus01 2y ago
  If we take the maximum size of geostationary publicly known commercial telecom satellite that's ever been launched as a reference, and what vehicle they launched on, it's probably in the range of 6000-8000kg total mass, including its expected lifespan of stationkeeping propellant.
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Much more, but they don't want you (or "the enemy") to know how much they know. Of course, Trump "accidentally" revealed the US's sattelite imagery capability (https://www.npr.org/2022/11/18/1137474748/trump-tweeted-an-image-from-a-spy-satellite-declassified-document-shows https://www.npr.org/2022/11/18/1137474748/trump-tweeted-an-i...). I think once the Ukraine war is over, maybe in years to come, the impact of US intelligence will become fully clear. I'm fairly sure it was due to US intelligence on the location of Russian ships like the Moskva that they were taken out, and that doesn't even need particularly high resolution cameras.
- herewulf 2y ago
  And that's a six year old image. Imagine the state of the art in 2025.