Satellite guy here. I really really enjoyed this analysis. My only point of objection (does anyone dare object to kleinbl00?) is in your assumptions on our current capabilities regarding satellite image resolution. It's likely that we've worked our way far out of the megapixel range, and combined this capability with fish-eye lensing techniques. The general rule is that the information in the public domain is ~15 years outdated behind what's actually being employed on the cutting edge of tech. That interval of time may have shortened somewhat, thanks to the internet. So... you'd only need a few pixels of airplane to be able to track its movements. There's a LOT of surveillance stuff in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and the way that the above linked declassified resolution (6 inches resolution @ 20,000 ft.) scales should be able to resolve something as large as a 777 in LEO, with a fish-eye lens. Again... the usage of a fish-eye lens is presumed, but likely. Additionally, who says that the field of view of these cameras is limited to staring straight down at the ground? I can assure you that we (the United States) have the ability to select a surveillance satellite and reorient the direction of the onboard sensors in any direction we so desire. Again, this is a question of real-time response to a request, which the Malaysian government probably never had the initiative to initiate on an immediate time scale. Basically, I'm in love with both kleinbl00 and playing devil's advocate, and in this response, you can behold me tearing myself apart via admiration vs. my love of debate. I whole-heartedly agree that this is a political quandary based in Malaysia's stubbornness, corruption, and naivety. They will pay for their sins in the way that the international community devalues their authority accordingly.
So I'm happy to speculate about this. I'll even throw down a few data points. 1) I watched the last KH-11 Block IV go up from Vandenberg. It was the one they used to keep an eye on Osama Bin Laden's compound. The patch is here: That's "The Devil You Know" in Latin - NROL-49 got delayed and delayed and delayed because the KH-11s were going to be replaced by Future Imagery Architecture, which was so astoundingly over budget and behind schedule that Congress killed it. So the most skookum optical satellite we've ever launched is pretty much the exact same optical block we've been using since this image was taken in 1986: That was a leak, by the way. The guy who gave that to Jane's went to jail. Chances are good it represents what the optics are capable of, not the sensor - there are limits to atmospheric perturbation. So based on the glass that's up there, we've got a pretty good idea what the resolution is. 2) The resolution you're talking about would have had an optical block like this: Definitely wider angle. Remember those two spare satellites the NRO gave to NASA? Yeah. The NRO will neither confirm nor deny that they were FIA birds. Which might well have used motion sensing or who knows what else, but they aren't in the sky. 3) From an intelligence gathering standpoint, it may be more practical to have your superwide angle lens somewhere you can deploy it quickly and without having its path mapped by your pet physics grads. DARPA has already demonstrated this. There's even an obvious platform for it: And a less obvious platform for it: Even then, you've got to have it pointed at something, and it sure looks like this particular plane is dead over the Indian Ocean. Something to consider about gigapixel surveillance - processing it is a bitch. One of the best ways to deal with it is to pare away the shit you aren't using and not even process it. Like, you know, jetliners in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It's also worth noting that while FIA got cancelled, FIA-R is steaming ahead (watched a couple of those go up, too - one in person, one on TV). These are, by all accounts, big impressive SIGINT birds from hell... which tends to demonstrate a shift in NRO intelligence gathering from IMINT to ELINT/COMINT. After all, when Lockheed decided to pump their stock with the announcement of the SR-72, they bragged about its ability to get optical over any theater at Mach 6: In short, I think you make cogent arguments, but I don't think the data supports them. Still, a fun conversation to have, so long as you ignore the missing bodies. And hey - if you know something I don't know, tell the guys at Jalama Beach it's cool to let me through the barricade, 'k? ;-) * BTW, got this from Jonathan's Space Report last night: MH370
----- The search for the lost Malaysian airliner, flight MH370, has involved
several satellites. It has been reported that US infrared assets (i.e.
DSP and its relatives) did not see any infrared event that could be
associated with an inflight explosion. Australian
Geospatial-Intelligence Organization analysis of Worldview-2 commercial satellite
imagery led to candidate debris in the Indian Ocean on Mar 20; successive
candidate debris fields have been seen in images from China's Gao Fen 1,
France's Spot-6 and Thailand's Thaichote/THEOS satellite. As of Mar 27
none of these leads have panned out. One constraint on the plane's location was obtained by measuring the
light-travel-time of two-way data communication between the Inmarsat 3F1
satellite in GEO at 64.5E and equipment aboard the plane - this gives a
distance but not a direction, leading to a wide arc-shaped search locus.
Additional analysis using the Doppler shift of the frequency gave the
component of relative speed of satellite and plane along the line
joining them; combining the information allowed analysts to narrow the
search zone to an ocean region 2300 km southwest of Australia.
Is there some type of recording involved with satellite imaging? Why isn't it possible to rewind to a point and time that we know the planes location and follow it from that point to figure this out? It just astounds me that in 2014 with everything available we can't find this....or supposedly.
Focus or perspective, pick one. So you've got a big-ass telescope. It's in space, pointed at the ground. It's not exactly a zoom lens - it's pretty much optimized to make the ground look really good from its orbit. How wide it'll go is not exactly public knowledge. However, here's a pretty-well zoomed out shot: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB13/7.jpg How tight it'll go isn't supposed to be public knowledge, but there are leaks. Here's an undegraded (to the best of my knowledge) KH-11 shot of a bomber a little smaller than a 777: You can infer that the imaging target of a KH-11 isn't more than a mile or so wide, depending on what it's pointed at. We could probably do some math and figure it out. Let's go ahead and go with that. Now go back and look at this page. And the hope - and it's quite a hope - is that at some point, recording data for no reason, in the middle of the ocean, a path 1 square wide managed to intersect the flight of an airplane. Do you understand?
That is an excellent link for putting it into perspective. For the record, even after that link and reading way too much about this shit, I am still baffled that a plane can go missing. Once it is missing, I can see how it can be nearly impossible to find. But between satellites, radar, gps, cell phones, etc etc etc etc, I have a hard time imagining how can it simply go 'poof'. I just re-read your above posts and, with numerous other articles on the subject, I am starting to understand why it can go poof. But the concept that it can go poof is still beyond grasp, I guess. The idea that these supposedly omniscient technologies aren't so omniscient its a difficult one. Blame Hollywood or ignorance. It's still a weirdly troubling thing..
We do not do well with abstractions. You've seen planes. They are large. You've been in them, with more strangers than you have friends. You've seen oceans. They are large. You've been in them; they seem to go on forever. Our concept of "large plane" is pretty far off, though. Each wing on a 777 is the size of a tennis court, more or less. You've met people who have those in their back yards. our concept of "large ocean" is truly fucked. If you stand on the shoreline and stare out as far as you can see, how much ocean are you looking at? 1000 square miles? 100? Fourteen square miles. Also according to Wolfram Alpha, about 1/3rd the size of Disney World. So let's say you could see that downed plane. Let's say you're standing on the beach with binoculars looking out. You're trying to find, essentially, a tennis court in a piece of Disney World. It's about 1/1000th of the area you can see. ...that's if the plane crashed in sight of you. The world is a very big place, and we are very small on't. Even when hundreds of us pile into a can, we are still a flyspeck on the Epcot Center.