[HN Gopher] Tracking "Dark Ships" with New Satellite Technology
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Tracking "Dark Ships" with New Satellite Technology
Author : jonbaer
Score : 127 points
Date : 2021-05-04 10:59 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gijn.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (gijn.org)
| zeristor wrote:
| Pretty impressive article about Iranian ships breaking Syrian
| sanctions.
| wavefunction wrote:
| That's the least interesting part of the article. The stuff
| about North Korean submarines and Chinese breaking North Korean
| sanctions is far more interesting.
| villgax wrote:
| I was just thinking if we can track who dumped those million
| barrels of toxic DDT off the coast of California with the recent
| Google Maps Time-lapse thing?
| kristjansson wrote:
| We know exactly who dumped them, and when, because the company
| doing the dumping kept records and shared them with
| investigators!
|
| https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-coast-ddt-dumping-ground...
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Its funny how newspapers keep touting evil china, but when
| Dow Chemical gassed 15,000 people in boupal to death they
| suffered no consequences in the west.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| The dumping happened decades ago.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Fascinating technology. I wonder when the first countries will
| try to use it to fight against Chinese vessels fishing entire
| ecosystems dry:
|
| - Africa has been hit hard, with fishers losing at least 40% of
| income (although here these ships do seem to have some sort of
| license): https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-china-s-
| fishermen-ar...
|
| - North Korean squid populations have been depleted so hard by
| Chinese vessels that Japan and South Korea felt the impact in
| reduced fishing amounts:
| https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/30/china-beijing-fishing-a...
|
| - The Philippines even reported "permanent structures" having
| been built on coral reefs to support illegal fishing:
| https://www.9news.com.au/world/south-china-sea-dispute-phili...
| baybal2 wrote:
| Most of Chinese pirate fishing happens in the open, with AIS
| on, and wholly reliant on victim country being unwilling, or
| too intimidated to use force.
|
| Chinese fishermen have a record of ramming foreign coast guard,
| and even military ships of smaller countries.
| coward76 wrote:
| I imagine a future with smugglers and pirates which only move
| during the day and generate enough smoke and water vapor during
| scheduled flyover to hide their journey
| tankenmate wrote:
| Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) can see right through vapour and
| smoke.
| coward76 wrote:
| I have revised my vision to remove the ineffective cloud and
| it now includes a cruise ship fiberglass "kitcar" shell
| instead.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| Your wake will get you. They are titanic signatures.
|
| Fun fact: a significant part of the Lockheed Sea Shadow
| program was wake suppression.
| mhh__ wrote:
| I'm guessing following an enormous plume of smoke might not be
| a challenge.
| 1_person wrote:
| or maybe they already use narco subs to avoid detection
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| I can't say that I'm surprised that the quality of surveillance
| goes up by fusing sensor types, you'll definitely see it more in
| your hometown over time.
|
| One thing that article made me think about is the morality of
| indicting shipments between two willing countries with ocean
| frontage. It's been a thing ever since bluewater navies got
| invented, but strikes me as having a sketchy ethical basis.
| lazide wrote:
| It is power applied, and power rarely bows to ethical concerns.
| We're going to see more of it too as the implications of new
| technology seeps into the various power structures. It takes
| decades, but you're seeing it happen.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| 'interdicting' of course.
| wcunning wrote:
| This plus the kinds of things the government does for mass
| surveillance in cities like Baltimore[0] seems to be a worrying
| trend in physical privacy these days... I used to say that you
| could always move to the radio dead zone in the Dakotas and give
| up Internet if you didn't want to be unduly tracked, but I'm
| beginning to wonder if even that is enough these days.
|
| 0: https://www.cato.org/blog/judge-allows-warrantless-aerial-
| su...
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| Caught blabbin on 16, amateurs. Learn how to work your darn
| signal lamp!
| ttul wrote:
| Umm, semaphore flags?
| zikzak wrote:
| Not when it's dark!
| dylan604 wrote:
| Maybe on full moons?
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Hopefully this will put an end to illegal Chinese fishing fleets
| that turn off their responders to avoid authorities, like when
| they plundered the waters off the Galapagos (https://www.theguard
| ian.com/environment/2020/jul/27/chinese-...).
| indigochill wrote:
| This has me thinking a sci-fi story centering around how hard
| monitoring large swaths of space actually is (with maybe some
| Expanse-style dicey politics for spice) would be pretty cool.
|
| This is already basically there, but the real-life ramifications
| for the people in these regions undercuts the enjoyment of the
| tech-political drama.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The Millenium Falcon is known to run with false transponder
| codes (May the 4th be with you ;) ).
|
| ... but for a more serious thought, and to trend deeper into
| hard sci-fi: you can have a lot of fun with questions like "How
| good is the technology to identify solid objects in space that
| are intentionally minimizing their radiation exposure?" You
| don't even have to go too fancy with stealth-coatings or Star
| Trek cloaking-devices; a challenge of _modern_ astronomoy is
| that shipping-vessel-sized rocks in space are very far away,
| reflect very little radiation, and can be moving extremely
| fast. Do the authorities monitor space with optical equipment,
| or do they have the resources to solve the distance-to-target
| problem by blanketing the space they control with a network of
| ships or sensors? Such a fabric would probably be the saddle-
| point between cheap and effective if they could be mass-
| produced.
|
| You can also have fun with propulsion. A ship "on the drift"
| can be much darker than a ship undergoing maneuvers... And it
| can even stay dark in the direction it's accelerating if it's
| using cold exhaust fired away from the observer (or if it has a
| lot of time to maneuver and does so by firing photons away from
| the observer, which will only be visible if they reflect off
| something behind the ship). This gets into a very submarine-
| combat feel, which the videogame "Objects In Space" explored.
|
| Interesting idea I don't think I've seen in sci-fi before is
| deploying a grid of small satellites in to space where all they
| do is measure the distances between each other. Then any
| objects passing through the grid gravitationally disrupt it,
| and depending on how accurate the distance measurements are
| (and how much math you can do to account for other gravity
| fluctuations), you could hypothetically get a _fairly_
| impenetrable safety net if you stick to hard-science and ships
| can 't create antigravity effects at range... A smaller-scale
| experiment like this involving two satellites orbiting the moon
| is how NASA mapped the mass concentrations resulting from
| meteorite impacts that disrupt the orbit of lunar satellites
| (and the trajectories of landing craft).
| at_a_remove wrote:
| As to your last idea, one of my old physics professors had a
| number of patents to his name, and I recollect something
| about the second excited state of the Helium-3 atom being
| able to detect minuscule variance in magnetic fields --
| suitable for a grid of buoys waiting for a submarine to drift
| by.
|
| Imagine _non-propulsion_. Selectively make one side of your
| ship ninety-nine percent black and the other side ninety-
| eight ... wait for light pressure to do its job. It 's slow
| but damned if that wouldn't be difficult to detect as a
| method of making maneuvers.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| The Dark Forest, the second book of Cixin Liu's Remembrance of
| Earth's Past Trilogy (Three Body Problem) goes into a good bit
| of exploration of the ramifications of space observation,
| communication and espionage in combination with relativistic
| distances starting out with roughly current human technology.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| The Honor Harrington series by David Weber might be of
| interest. A lot of the strategy revolves around how hard
| patrolling, monitoring, and communicating (due to the time
| delay) in space is, and there is a good bit of politics as
| well.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Honor Harrington series by David Weber_
|
| It's literally my favorite science fiction. I also recommend
| purchasing and reading at least the first half of the series.
| The latter half of the series go into a lot more political
| fiction instead of science fiction but it's definitely worth
| reading if you like the political story that develops in the
| middle of the series.
| Sn0wCoder wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation turns out the first 2 books are
| free for kindle.
| philsnow wrote:
| There was a whole subplot with Marco Inaros about exactly that
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Space has some unique challenges for both hiding and finding
| those who don't want to be found. For one you dont have a radar
| horizon. And combine that with microgravity means you can have
| arbitrarily large and powerful radar stations in space which
| can see for arbitrarily long distances.
|
| Arecibo was until it sadly collapsed last year, not just a
| large radio telescope but the largest radar disk in the world.
| Larger radio telescopes lacked that feature. In space you could
| exceed it without the obvious scaling issues of such a large
| structure and its weight.
|
| You also have heat as a problem. That space is cold is a bit or
| a misnomer. The problem with space is that its a near perfect
| vacuum so things tend to stay the same temp unless they are in
| direct sunlight. And if they are its hard to dump that heat.
|
| With appropriate thermal imaging it would be pretty easy to
| tell a spacecraft apart from rocks because it will be making
| its own heat. Since radiation is the only reliable form of
| losing that heat you need large radiators on your craft like
| the ISS has. But those run contrary to good stealth design
| practices.
|
| There is also the matter of orbits and how natural objects
| simply aren't going to have certain ones so no matter how
| innocuous you may look, if you are taking a path only a
| spacecraft would take nobody is going to be fooled.
| j9461701 wrote:
| Here is an article on this topic that goes heavily in depth
| on the topic:
|
| http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2018/04/permanent-and-perfect-
| st...
|
| Note that this is for strategic level stealth, which is to
| say your enemy doesn't even know you're in system. Tactical
| level stealth is vastly easier, and can be as simple as
| launching several hundred thousand heated decoys into system
| before entering yourself - one of these is the attacker, can
| you find which?
|
| This last strategy is actually what we'd implement if ever
| anyone tried to seriously develop anti-ICBM technology.
| toss1 wrote:
| Combine that with "Rods From God" or another non-explosive high-
| altitude loitering weapon and no transponder/no reason starts
| being an invite to Davey Jones Locker -- it might be costly but
| would pretty quickly dampen poaching and sanctions-busting...
| hnnnnnnng wrote:
| This reminds me of the post about SAR satellites being able to
| peer inside buildings. Setting up a corner reflector would cause
| a giant bright spot to appear on the radar return. If all the
| ships did this, it would be much more difficult to track them.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25455852
| notahacker wrote:
| I think the key part of that post is 'it would also draw a lot
| of attention to you'...
|
| Might make it harder to establish the size of crates on your
| ship with ultra high resolution SAR, but you certainly wouldn't
| be hidden .
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Only illegitimate ships would have any reason to do this, so I
| don't think the tactic could be very effective. If anything, it
| would make the illegitimate ships even more visible. Legitimate
| ships already have their AIS turned on, so they are by default
| trackable and have no need to nor benefit from evading
| satellite monitoring.
| 1_person wrote:
| I believe this is false.
|
| I have seen several sailing texts explicitly recommend the
| use of a retroreflector to improve the radar visibility of
| small fiberglass vessels.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Sorry, I should have specified that only illegitimate ships
| would have a reason for doing it for the purpose of hiding
| from scrutiny. I do not know all the other reasons why one
| might do this, but it seems to me based on the content of
| this article that the set of retroreflector hits less the
| AIS signatures would yield only illegitimate ships.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| > Sorry, I should have specified that only illegitimate
| ships would have a reason for doing it for the purpose of
| hiding from scrutiny.
|
| That smells of "if you have nothing to hide, you have
| nothing to fear"
| InitialLastName wrote:
| It's more "a rule the US Navy and its agreeable
| subsidiaries are happy to enforce by strategic novel
| shipwreck generation".
| zsmi wrote:
| I have very limited experience navigating in water but I
| would think collision avoidance would be an excellent
| reason to mandate AIS.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| In the case of maritime travel, this is actually the law
| of the seas, as discussed in the article. Whether it's
| true or not that you have "nothing to hide", you are not
| allowed to sail "under the radar". Same as how you are
| mostly not allowed to fly without a transponder.
| emilecantin wrote:
| I thought they were going to talk about Canada's RADARSAT
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RADARSAT_Constellation), a new
| constellation that was launched for exactly this purpose.
| Apparently we've been having issues with foreign fishing vessels
| depleting the stocks in our territorial waters.
| Diederich wrote:
| Huh, a past employer of mine, Orbital Insight, has been tracking
| these 'dark ships' for years using a couple of different methods.
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