[HN Gopher] North Korean ICBM launch detected using GPS
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       North Korean ICBM launch detected using GPS
        
       Author : Pietertje
       Score  : 220 points
       Date   : 2022-11-27 12:22 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (twitter.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
        
       | H8crilA wrote:
       | Isn't the ionosphere already past the burn-out phase of a
       | ballistic missile? I.e. by the time the rocket gets there it is
       | just a glorified harpoon. Or perhaps that doesn't matter as
       | anything of this size travelling at this speed would cause
       | detectable disturbance?
        
       | krisoft wrote:
       | Here is the code which generated the linked video:
       | https://github.com/tylerni7/missile-tid
        
       | ransom1538 wrote:
       | I will avoid politics in this comment. But, is the current
       | US/JP/SK plan to wait until NK gets a working ICBM with a nuclear
       | warhead and hope he acts rationally?
        
         | vkou wrote:
         | Acquiring and developing nuclear weapons seems to be the most
         | rational thing North Korea has done in a very long time.
         | 
         | Neither the Iraq nor Ukraine conflicts would have happened if
         | they were nuclear states.
         | 
         | An armed society is a polite society, or so I've been told
         | many, many times.
        
           | tdeck wrote:
           | Just to add a little context to this comment, the world's
           | foremost nuclear power (the USA) runs live-fire exercises
           | every year where its army practices invading North Korea.
           | Under these circumstances, it's entirely rational for the NK
           | government to develop nuclear weapons.
           | 
           | If the US government really wanted to stop this, it could
           | offer a good faith deal for disarmament involving some kind
           | of reduction of sanctions or normalization of relations.
           | 
           | Instead US politicians prefer to hypocritically hand-wring
           | about other countries' nuclear development while maintaining
           | a massive nuclear arsenal to threaten every other country,
           | and while invading or bombing other countries on a regular
           | basis. These are the actions that cause states to feel
           | threatened enough to pour enormous resources into nuclear
           | weapons development.
        
             | avereveard wrote:
             | Apparently only certain kind of states feel threatened. I
             | wonder what the common thread is between them
             | 
             | Oh right, it's the dictatorial megalomaniacs that spew anti
             | western rethoric as distraction for their masses, that who.
             | 
             | Truly evil, these USA are.
        
               | tdeck wrote:
               | By this logic Saudi Arabia should feel threatened. But
               | Saudi Arabia is a US client state so it doesn't need to
               | worry.
               | 
               | Also, you completely ignored the part about the US
               | practicing invading the country every year. Apparently
               | that doesn't constitute a threat?
        
               | avereveard wrote:
               | Eh out of the schoolyard we're past "he whom hasn't fault
               | may throw the first stone"
               | 
               | And I don't coun't that many bullshit wars. The second
               | invasion of Iraq, maybe Afghanistan. Lybia was, but it
               | was France's bullshit war.
               | 
               | Besides Usa has many allies and responsabilities, it's
               | not that strange having them involved in many conflicts.
        
             | yongjik wrote:
             | > live-fire exercises every year where its army practices
             | invading North Korea
             | 
             | It's "practicing invading North Korea" in the same sense
             | North Korea's missile tests are "practicing dropping nukes
             | on America." It's a war practice, all options are on the
             | table, with the hope that they won't be necessary.
             | 
             | South Korea and the US had canceled the yearly joint
             | exercise in 2019, hoping for a better relation with North
             | Korea. It didn't work out - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
             | ki/List_of_North_Korean_missile_t...
             | 
             | The exercise resumed in 2022.
        
               | tdeck wrote:
               | > It's "practicing invading North Korea" in the same
               | sense North Korea's missile tests are "practicing
               | dropping nukes on America."
               | 
               | The context here is extremely important. All of this (the
               | invasion exercises, the missile tests, the Korean War)
               | have taken place in the Korean peninsula. None of it has
               | threatened the US homeland in a meaningful way.
               | 
               | In addition, the exercises have been going on since 1997.
               | That's a long time before any missile tests were
               | conducted. If the DPRK (North Korea's name for its state)
               | had been testing nukes from Cuba in 1997 I'd feel
               | differently. But note that even dropping live bombs on
               | other countries is something the US gets to do without
               | starting a war because the US military is so powerful.
               | Very few other countries operate that way and North Korea
               | certainly isn't one of them.
        
           | swagasaurus-rex wrote:
           | Who helped North Korea acquire nuclear weapons? Was it a wise
           | choice? Only time will tell.
        
             | [deleted]
        
         | ravenstine wrote:
         | They've launched them in the last year. This is really nothing
         | new.
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEgE4R_6fLU
        
         | rafael09ed wrote:
         | That question implies that they couldn't land a nuke in Japan
         | or South Korea currently. I think their current rockets have
         | that capability.
        
           | germinalphrase wrote:
           | They do - but that's only part of the risk. The logistics
           | around nuke delivery is more complicated (or course).
           | 
           | For the interested: "Arms Control Wonk" podcast and blog with
           | Jeffery Lewis and Aaron Stein are good resources.
        
         | mikeyouse wrote:
         | They very likely already have that.. they've detonated >50kt
         | nukes and have mobile ICBM launchers that have demonstrated
         | rockets with thousands of miles of range.
         | 
         | They could almost certainly detonate a nuclear weapon in Korea
         | or Japan. I'd put even odds on a strike on Guam, but probably
         | not quite capable of hitting Western US.
        
           | dontbenebby wrote:
           | >they've detonated >50kt nukes
           | 
           | Are you sure? Didn't they also detonate a buncha TNT to make
           | it look like a nuke blast once?
           | 
           | (A weird thing to lie about.)
        
             | hamandcheese wrote:
             | > A weird thing to lie about.
             | 
             | Having the world believe you have nukes is nearly as
             | valuable as actually having them.
        
               | cfraenkel wrote:
               | More valuable, in any rational sense of the term. Having
               | them without anyone believing that you have them is more
               | or less useless. Their only purpose is deterrence (unless
               | you have a death wish for your population, and there are
               | easier methods available if that's your 'use case')
        
               | IAmGraydon wrote:
               | I believe that's his point.
        
           | NikkiA wrote:
           | They've put stuff in orbit before, so I'd wager they could
           | hit the continental US, but probably without any accuracy
           | beyond maybe picking a state.
        
             | kortilla wrote:
             | They haven't gotten anything to orbit with the weight of an
             | atomic bomb with the proper shielding to handle re-entry.
        
               | NikkiA wrote:
               | Kwangmyongsong-4 was apparently 200Kg, which is actually
               | just about enough.
        
         | jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
         | NK _has_ a working ICBM with a nuclear warhead today. It 's
         | already done. The time to stop it was back in the 90s.
        
           | rich_sasha wrote:
           | Do we know they can make warheads small enough to fit on
           | ICBMs? I always understood that is quite difficult.
           | 
           | AFAICT we know they have blown up stationary nukes and shot
           | out inert ballistic missiles.
        
             | FpUser wrote:
             | They might ask Russia for help
        
             | bismuthcrystal wrote:
             | Lets speculate a little bit for argument sake. Take this
             | with a grain of salt because I am not a specialist, just a
             | information hoarder.
             | 
             | Lets put miniaturization aside and focus on another
             | aspects, which i judge will be more critical.
             | 
             | The warhead must survive mechanical stress of launch and
             | reentry, and thermal stress at reentry. The question is:
             | can it be designed only with computers and public
             | knowledge? They could build small hypersonic wind tunnel to
             | collect data and simulate the rest.
        
         | samus wrote:
         | Even assuming it's not already too late for that: what could
         | they do? NK is already sanctioned to the max. And the few
         | leavers that they can still pull probably wouldn't be enough to
         | stop them at this point. And them being so close to China and
         | SK makes any direct military action against them likely to
         | trigger WW3.
        
           | retrac wrote:
           | If JP/SK/US did decide on military action against North
           | Korea, I would expect China to stand back, close their
           | border, and do nothing but make loud protest noises. They're
           | not keen on sharing a border with a US client state. They're
           | also not keen on a rogue North Korea with nukes.
           | 
           | The main issue is that, even without nuclear weapons, North
           | Korea has enough conventional arms, including chemical
           | weapons, to cause horrific damage to South Korea. Seoul's
           | entire urban area is within artillery range of the DMZ. I've
           | seen estimates of varying credibility but most experts speak
           | of hundreds of thousands of deaths on the first day of
           | shelling, if a full-scale war broke out on the Korean
           | peninsula.
        
             | FpUser wrote:
             | >"If JP/SK/US did decide on military action against North
             | Korea"
             | 
             | NK is no longer part of NPT. Would not this war be illegal?
             | How does it correspond with "we are the nation of laws"?
             | 
             | >"I would expect China to stand back"
             | 
             | And what if it does not?
        
               | retrac wrote:
               | I know quite well, as you probably do, that international
               | law has zero bearing on the military decisions made by
               | the USA in terms of its interests. Yes, it'd be illegal,
               | unless the UN Security Council gave its blessing. Just
               | like the second Gulf War was illegal. That has never
               | stopped the US before.
               | 
               | > How does it correspond with "we are the nation of
               | laws"?
               | 
               | It does not. The United States government rejects the
               | idea it is restricted by international law on these
               | matters.
               | 
               | As for South Korea, it can argue it's an internal
               | domestic matter.
        
               | FpUser wrote:
               | >"That has never stopped the US before"
               | 
               | I know this much. My question was largely rhetorical.
        
               | colechristensen wrote:
               | "Illegal war" is just a phrase to make political noise
               | about military action you don't like.
               | 
               | There are treaties, not laws, and no body to actually
               | enforce laws, it's just diplomacy. General practices are
               | agreed upon but they're basically just loose agreements.
        
           | bmitc wrote:
           | I have been wondering: is North Korea an example of sanctions
           | not working or having the opposite effect? By sanctioning
           | North Korea to the moon and back, they have no other choice
           | but to bottle up, tighten the hatches, take an authoritarian
           | stance, deal with people willing to do deals under the table,
           | and search for ways to strike back. Since they don't have the
           | capability of building a traditional military force, they go
           | for the biggest thing they can: nuclear missiles. Meanwhile,
           | their people starve and suffer.
           | 
           | Are there not alternative policies that would work a little
           | better? North Korea just seems like a cornered badger and
           | will continue to act like one. If you "opened" up the country
           | by reducing some sanctions, it seems they'd have to adapt to
           | be more civilized. These are more questions than statements.
        
             | avereveard wrote:
             | We tried detente and appeasement various times and at
             | various stages, it usually doesn't work
        
               | bmitc wrote:
               | What is the end game with North Korea though? It seems
               | the only options are:
               | 
               | * It collapses on its own or there's an internal
               | revolution or coup. This would be a mess though because
               | of the whole China, Russia, South Korea claims probably.
               | 
               | * It does something drastic and attacks and then gets
               | invaded. That also seems a mess because now it's China,
               | Russia, South Korea, and the U.S. and maybe Japan,
               | depending on who it attacks.
        
       | noobhack wrote:
       | K
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | I'd like to see the amount of false positives/negatives, rather
       | than just data of one day.
        
         | krisoft wrote:
         | They don't really seem to have a detector. They have a thing
         | which makes visualisations, and it seems it should be possible
         | to build a detector on top of that, but that doesn't seem to be
         | done yet.
        
       | beardyw wrote:
       | Is it possible someone could explain as if to a small child what
       | data can be collected from GPS which shows this effect. I don't
       | understand.
        
         | chmod775 wrote:
         | I don't think I could explain it to a small child, given that I
         | don't have a great understanding of it myself. But here's what
         | I could scrape together based on a linked paper[1]:
         | 
         | You use GPS receivers to detect ionospheric disturbances.
         | Ionosphere, coming from the word "ionized", means it consists
         | of charged particles, positive or negative. (Missile) exhaust
         | is mainly neutral molecules, creating a "hole". These
         | ionospheric holes can be detected through the Faraday
         | Effect[2]. By measuring the Faraday rotation of radio signals
         | (like GPS), you can detect these holes. I think this is similar
         | to how polarized light 3d cinema systems work, except it's the
         | radio spectrum instead of light.
         | 
         | [1]
         | https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
         | 
         | [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_effect
        
         | krisoft wrote:
         | GPS signals go through the ionosphere on their way from the
         | satelites. The ionosphere causes distortions in the signal. If
         | you want to achieve the best navigational accuracy you need to
         | account for these distortions.
         | 
         | These distortions are not constant. They change from time to
         | time. There are many different ways to account for them. One of
         | the most accurate solution is to keep a GPS receiver on a well
         | known location. Since you know that this receiver haven't moved
         | you can use the signal measured to estimate the parameters of
         | the ionosphere between that station and the satelite.
         | 
         | Normally these signals are used to correct GPS navigational
         | solutions. You take the closest station to your moving receiver
         | and assume that whatever way the ionosphere was distorting for
         | that station will do the same for your receiver too. This is
         | valuable so there are network of such GPS stations in a lot of
         | places.
         | 
         | Here they use the data collected by these stations differently.
         | Instead of correcting a navigational solution they visualise
         | the measured state of the ionosphere as seen by a bunch of
         | these stations.
        
           | morcheeba wrote:
           | Good explanation.
           | 
           | A simple GPS receiver will have a generic mathematical model
           | for the ionosphere and use that as a good guess. More
           | advanced ones can measure the delay directly.
           | 
           | The ionosphere affects different frequencies differently, so
           | the GPS satellites transmits additional signals at different
           | frequencies. By measuring the phase of these signals (L1 and
           | L2), the math can be done to get a better estimation of the
           | delay caused by the ionosphere between each satellite and the
           | receiver. Those are the dots we're seeing on this animation.
           | (GPS also uses the L2 signal to transmit encrypted
           | information that lets military receivers get a better fix
           | than civilian receivers).
           | 
           | more info: https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog862/node/1715
        
           | cm2187 wrote:
           | But what are the moving dots in the animation? Planes,
           | satellites? (seems to move like neither).
           | 
           | GPS being a military technology, I presume those fixed gps
           | stations are only located in US-friendly countries. You
           | wouldn't get that adjustment if you are flying over Russia or
           | China, or any ocean. How much of an error in absolute
           | distance are we talking about here? A few cm or meters or a
           | km?
        
             | krisoft wrote:
             | > But what are the moving dots in the animation? Planes,
             | satellites?
             | 
             | Neither. The stations are in Japan. Imagine a line going
             | from each of those stations to the satellite. Where this
             | line crosses the ionoshpere that spot is what is measured.
             | That is what you have information about. Those spots are
             | the dots.
             | 
             | So you basically see the arc of the Japanese islands
             | projected up towards each satelite which is visible from
             | these stations. When the satelite is low on the horizon
             | this projection seems to move fast, and when it is near the
             | zenit it seems to move slow. This is what you are seeing
             | with the dots.
             | 
             | Their location is calculated here:
             | https://github.com/tylerni7/missile-
             | tid/blob/main/tid/tec.py...
             | 
             | "Given a receiver and a satellite, where does the line
             | between them intersect with the ionosphere?"
             | 
             | And then that is called here:
             | https://github.com/tylerni7/missile-
             | tid/blob/00c5fd25e2ab3c2...
             | 
             | "The locations where the signals associated with this
             | connection penetrate the ionosphere."|
        
               | jwsteigerwalt wrote:
               | This explanation helps understand the video.
        
               | layer8 wrote:
               | What are the stations/receivers? Is this crowdsourced
               | data?
        
               | williamscales wrote:
               | They have a GPS receiver in a fixed, known location. They
               | measure the received signal and from the variations infer
               | corrections for ionospheric effects. They are part of the
               | GPS network.
               | 
               | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNSS_augmentation
        
             | danbruc wrote:
             | _But what are the moving dots in the animation?_
             | 
             | I would guess the moving dots are fixed GPS receivers, or
             | more precisely the intersections of lines between fixed GPS
             | receivers and moving GPS satellites with a sphere around
             | Earth representing the ionosphere. If you look at the shape
             | of the moving clusters, some look like Japan.
        
           | squarefoot wrote:
           | > One of the most accurate solution is to keep a GPS receiver
           | on a well known location.
           | 
           | I wonder if a network of connected devices with a GPS-
           | disciplined SDR receiver and a regular GPS one could work
           | both as this project does plus as passive radar like the
           | software that was recently taken down. The purpose would be
           | to have much wider coverage along with redundancy and error
           | correction.
        
             | toomuchtodo wrote:
             | Such networks exist and make their data public. I think the
             | equivalent you're looking for is like LightningMaps, where
             | there is real time reporting of observations instead of
             | having to process recorded data to look back in time?
             | 
             | https://geodesy.noaa.gov/CORS_Map/
             | 
             | https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog862/node/1830
             | 
             | https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/how-to-build-a-diy-
             | gnss...
        
             | colechristensen wrote:
             | I worked on something like this in university. GPS bistatic
             | radar. Two SDR frontends with directional antennas pointed
             | in different directions to do various remote sensing,
             | ranging, and other things.
             | 
             | The GPS network is essentially kept up to date with a few
             | ground stations. The ground station is a source of truth
             | that is used to send correction updates to the
             | constellation periodically which are sent to all receivers.
        
         | thatcherc wrote:
         | Section 2.1 in their linked paper (https://agupubs.onlinelibrar
         | y.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...) gives some clues. I think
         | this is what's going on:
         | 
         | GPS receivers work by figuring out how far away they are from a
         | number (>3) of GPS satellites. The receiver knows where the GPS
         | satellites are (since the satellites broadcast their orbit
         | parameters) so if a receiver knows how far it is from several
         | satellites it can work out where it is itself.
         | 
         | Now, as the GPS satellite signals travel through Earth's
         | atmosphere, they can be slowed down by different atmospheric
         | effects. A slower signal will cause the receiver to think it's
         | farther away from a satellite than it really is, so the
         | receiver might estimate that it's position has changed a little
         | bit. However, if you _know_ the receiver 's position hasn't
         | change (maybe it's fixed in place to a big rock), then you can
         | attribute the receiver's measured "change in position" to a
         | change in atmosphere characteristics.
         | 
         | In this paper, they seem to have lots of fixed GPS receivers
         | all over the place. By looking at all of them together, they
         | can make a sort of map of the atmosphere characters in a part
         | of the sky that's affected by rocket launches. The authors see
         | these big ripples emanating from a Falcon Heavy launch in the
         | US and this tweet shows those same ripples emanating from a
         | launch site in North Korea.
        
         | jvm___ wrote:
         | As you walk past a school you yell with your voice, your friend
         | nearby knows what you sound like but he hears you differently
         | because your voice also bounces off the school wall. He adjusts
         | the sound based on what you should sound like, the leftover bit
         | is the shape of the wall.
         | 
         | You can figure out if someone moved a brick (or launched a
         | missile) because your voice changes when it reaches your friend
         | and he needs to apply a new change to get your voice back.
         | 
         | We can see the signal changes the rocket causes to the
         | ionosphere and know that it's happened.
        
         | tejtm wrote:
         | Fun house mirrors are curved and distort your reflection.
         | 
         | Some fun house mirrors are flexible so they can get pushed or
         | pulled which will make you look taller or shorter or fatter or
         | skinnier than you know you are.
         | 
         | By observing the difference between how you appear compared
         | with how you are; you can learn something about how the
         | flexible mirror is being curved.
         | 
         | How this works in the fun house is there is you the mirror and
         | LIGHT.
         | 
         | Both you and the light are well known and easy to predict;
         | light will travel straight(ish) and you will not suddenly
         | become very very short, so the thing that is changing your
         | appearance is the flexible mirror.
         | 
         | In the GPS rocket case, the GPS satellites are the illuminating
         | source corresponding to the light in the room sending out radio
         | (electromagnetic radiation same as light just at longer
         | wavelengths)
         | 
         | The ground station GPS receivers correspond to your eyes (they
         | know what they *should* see).
         | 
         | The earth's ionosphere corresponds to the flexible fun house
         | mirror.
         | 
         | taken together, the same way you could tell if something we
         | can't see behind the mirror flexed it, the author of the post
         | showed they can tell if, when and where an unannounced rocket
         | goes through the ionosphere.
        
       | perihelions wrote:
       | Related: last month's [0] gamma-ray burst also had interesting,
       | measurable effects on the ionosphere,
       | 
       | https://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn3/32744.gcn3 ( _" GRB221009A:
       | Detection as sudden ionospheric disturbances (SID)"_)
       | 
       | https://www.qsl.net/df3lp/grb221009/KLM_grb221009a_magnitude...
       | (from the above link)
       | 
       | http://abelian.org/vlf/grb221009a-DHO.png
       | 
       | http://abelian.org/vlf/grb221009a-NAA.png
       | 
       | http://abelian.org/vlf/grb221009a-NSY.png
       | 
       | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33215572 ( _" Record-
       | breaking gamma-ray burst possibly most powerful explosion ever
       | recorded"_)
       | 
       | This was detected with VLF radio, but I wonder if this kind of
       | event also has an effect on GPS signals? The time-of-arrival of
       | astrophysical gamma rays isn't uniform across the earth.
        
       | gregfjohnson wrote:
       | What I wonder about is all of the technologies that go into
       | ICBM's with nuclear weapons. My layman's guess is that there is
       | active support and collaboration of the NK nuclear program from
       | outside. North Korea is a headache for the US and other western
       | powers, one more thing to consume policy bandwidth and military
       | preparedness. This would seem to be in the interests of China and
       | Russia, and perhaps others. I don't worry too much about the
       | threats that periodically emanate from North Korean; if they
       | start to exceed their utility from the perspective of China and
       | Russia, the needed resources to maintain a viable nuclear program
       | can be quickly shut off. I do hope that I will live to see a
       | "1989" moment in which the North Korean regime is overthrown, and
       | relegated to a horrible and sad footnote in human history.
        
         | walrus01 wrote:
         | Google "aq khan pakistan north korea"
         | 
         | https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=aq+khan+p...
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan
         | 
         | Yes there _was_ a great deal of outside help with their
         | enrichment and weapons design.
        
         | aredox wrote:
         | Both nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles are technologies
         | from the 1940's.
         | 
         | They don't need outside help.
        
         | laurencerowe wrote:
         | While Russia and China don't want to see North Korea collapse
         | as existing nuclear powers they don't especially want to see
         | other countries acquire nuclear weapons.
         | 
         | Active support and collaboration came from Pakistan, Iran and
         | Libya who were all trying to develop nuclear weapons of their
         | own.
         | 
         | https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentar...
        
       | dontbenebby wrote:
       | >Missiles make ionospheric disturbances that GPS records. The
       | yellow ripple is the ionospheric disturbance.
       | 
       | Where can I read more about the meta level concept of "isopheric
       | disturbances"? (Because I suspect I'll find this has been done by
       | military intelligence for a long time then rediscovered by so
       | called "arms control" wonks who insist on putting their code into
       | the public domain.)
        
         | teeray wrote:
         | Ham radio is actually where you'll find a lot on the subject.
         | "Band conditions" are determined by the amount of ionospheric
         | disturbance present. For example, meteors entering the
         | atmosphere produce a disturbance that can reflect radio--there
         | are ham radio techniques that exploit this to communicate.
        
         | krisoft wrote:
         | The second tweet in the linked thread links to the paper which
         | inspired them:
         | 
         | https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
         | 
         | > who insist on putting their code into the public domain
         | 
         | You say that as if there is something wrong with that.
        
           | dontbenebby wrote:
           | >You say that as if there is something wrong with that.
           | 
           | So to be clear, you an arms control expert public domaining
           | code that aids totalitarians like Putin and the North Koreans
           | has... "nothing wrong with that"?
           | 
           | Some domain specific knowledge was meant to be esoteric* and
           | there are a variety of better licenses such as CC-non-
           | commercial that allow peaceful uses of the code without
           | allowing it to be used by _literally_ anyone on the planet.
           | 
           | (*Unless you pay the proper fees, of course. But that's not
           | just about money... you have to earn the right to make the
           | purchase.)
        
             | Dylan16807 wrote:
             | I do not feel bad about indirectly aiding them with well-
             | after-the-fact missile trail detection. Why should I? Why
             | should this be difficult to do?
             | 
             | It can be called "military" but it doesn't help with
             | offenses and doesn't really help with defenses either.
        
               | dontbenebby wrote:
               | >well-after-the-fact missile trail detection.
               | 
               | Sorry, I missed that bit, I thought this could also be
               | used to detect incoming missiles.
               | 
               | I do not want my enemies to be able to detect incoming
               | missiles.
               | 
               | Sorry for posting so angrily.
        
               | kadoban wrote:
               | To do anything about incoming missiles, you'd need
               | extremely low latency tracking, integrated into whatever
               | system you're using anyway. Not sure exactly you'd be
               | worried about even if this was near-real-time.
        
               | rosnd wrote:
               | You could probably use techniques like this to rig an
               | early warning system on enemy territory, but there are of
               | course better options.
        
               | thot_experiment wrote:
               | Wild! I don't think I've ever seen someone who thinks
               | restricting tech like this is actually a good idea. I
               | thought that was just like, crazy government people who
               | don't understand technology.
               | 
               | I'd hoped we'd moved past printing the entire code of PGP
               | in a hardback book in an OCR font but I guess y'all still
               | out here.
        
           | InCityDreams wrote:
           | " /s", spotted on my end.
        
         | Xylakant wrote:
         | If you follow the thread, there's a link to
         | https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
         | which contains this introduction:
         | 
         | ======== It is widely recognized that rocket launches can be an
         | anthropogenic source to trigger traveling ionospheric
         | disturbances (TIDs) by generating acoustic-gravity waves
         | (Afraimovich et al., 2002; Arendt, 1971; Bowling et al., 2013;
         | Calais & Minster, 1996; Chou et al., 2018; Ding et al., 2014;
         | Kakinami et al., 2013; Li et al., 1994; Lin et al., 2014; Lin,
         | Chen, et al., 2017; Lin, Shen, et al., 2017; Noble, 1990). The
         | rocket-induced long-distance propagating TIDs associated with
         | shock/ducted gravity waves and internal gravity waves were
         | observed by using Arecibo incoherent scatter radar (Noble,
         | 1990) and ground-based Global Positioning System total electron
         | content (TEC) observations (Calais & Minster, 1996). Lin, Shen,
         | et al. (2017) first reported the rocket-induced shock waves and
         | concentric TIDs (CTIDs) subsequently using Global Positioning
         | System TEC over California-Pacific region. They suggested that
         | the CTIDs are the manifestation of concentric gravity waves
         | that were originated from the mesopause region. ====
         | 
         | The effect seems to be proven quite a while ago. Using GPS
         | receivers to make that widely accessible seems to be new, but I
         | honestly doubt that military intelligence would rely on that -
         | I'm confident they have more direct methods to detect launches
         | such as (radar) satellites.
        
           | EmilioMartinez wrote:
           | What does "gravity waves" mean in this context?
        
       | ilyt wrote:
       | That's one of most impressive examples of essentially "passive
       | radar" I"ve seen!
        
       | darepublic wrote:
       | After-effects of WW2 still posing existential threat to us all..
        
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       (page generated 2022-11-27 23:01 UTC)