I'm skeptical of that theory. Sunspot is up in the Lincoln National Forest. There are multiple trails and locations that have a great view of White Sands and Holloman AFB, which are located in the basin below. There isn't anything special about the view from Sunspot that I can recall.
What kinds of places were you told not to look? (I'm guessing you couldn't physically point it at targets on the ground, so I assume certain sections of the sky.) Who was it that was commanding you not to look?
I work adjacent to some satellites that do visual-spectrum imaging of the earth, and even we fall under these regulations.
In addition to all the NOAA licensing for imaging the ground, you need extra licenses for taking pictures of space. (it's useful, for example, to image the moon as a way of calibrating cameras & telescopes without atmospheric interference, and tracking stars is one of the most reliable ways to determine spacecraft attitude)
One of the requirements is that if we take a picture of space and there's anything moving in the picture (presumably a near-earth satellite), we delete all copies of the picture and forget we ever took it, but only after offering it for sale to the Air Force at a commercially reasonable price.
I'm sure there are additional layers on top of it, that's just the facets of it that I've been exposed to in the mandatory company-wide regulatory training.
Does it? You have one potential customer, and you have to create product on spec, offer it to them at a price you don't control, and destroy the unsold material whether or not the one customer pays for a copy.
Building a viable business model around that without corrupt influence over the single buyer seems impractical.
Sure, the US has considerable leverage over the sorts of things people are allowed to launch into space, but I have a hard time believing it could maintain a similar degree of control over ground-based telescopes.
I won't elaborate. A neat book just came out though :
Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military https://g.co/kgs/XdRZFu
Thanks for the link. I haven't seen the book, but I know when I took a computational physics class as an undergrad (~25 years ago), there was a definite overlap between the modeling necessary to understand stellar collapse, and the modeling necessary to build better nuclear weapons.
A late friend who worked on type II supernova simulations was once invited to talk about his team's software with some gentlemen at an NNSA lab, Los Alamos or Livermore or Sandia (I forget which one.)
At the conclusion of the talk, the DOE guys said appreciative things about the current work, but also pointed out that certain avenues of investigation into certain characteristics might lead to the gov't declaring this software classified, and restricting who might have access to it. My friend was at the time not a US citizen, so he would have been locked out of contributing to his own work.
"Nice piece of software you have there, would be a shame if something...happened to it..."
There's a story about a US astrophysicist grad student working on stellar evolution. A visiting Soviet scientist came to give a talk. At the end the student asked a question about one aspect of the talk, something like, how do you know the plasma is transparent to photons at that temperature? The visiting Russian just said "it is." Later, the grad student mentioned it, quizzically, to his advisor. His advisor pointed out that it was something that came out of nuclear bomb research.
I worked on a project that happened to have some spy satellite data as noise...
You can hide them. A common practice is to do an orbital maneuver when the satellite is directly between the Sun-Earth line-of-sight, where attempts to use instruments are pretty well saturated/destroyed.
With that said, it is still possible to see where the satellites go after such a boost if you are able to look really close to the limb of the sun with the right kind of equipment :)
I don't understand this thread. Sure with enough effort and manpower you can prevennt your own civilians from discovering these. How would the US government stop civilian entities in say Russia or China from discovering these? I still see a marginal potential utility though: not showing adversaries that you have noticed their satellites (in order to prevent them from improving their stealth).
Sure, but it's a big telescope mostly buried in the ground designed to look at the sun. Not sure how much use it could possibly be in relation to its proximity to White Sands and/or Holloman.
Solar observatories need to track the sun, so they use a little mirror (heliostat) at the tunnel entrance that changes angle to track the sun, so you can point it anywhere.
What law would this violate? Please be specific, as legal definitions of things like espionage are often not as broad as a layperson might guess (and on occasion, they're broader).
Once the party was informed, and thus had knowledge, of the national defense sensitivity involves, it would seem arguably to facially violate the Espionage Act of 1917, as amended; in particular, 18 USC §§ 793, 795, and, if they attempt to publish the pictures, 797, and/or, if the order originates with NASA, 799.
793 requires "intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation", but 795 and 797 could potentially apply. Thank you.
There's no way prosecutors and courts would actually commit to an Espionage Act conviction of an astronomer for looking at the wrong part of the sky. That's absurd.
Photographing and publishing or sending to unauthorized parties foreign or domestic, bet on it. You might get away with a stern visit from one of the 3-letter-agencies if it's minor importance and ignorance, but do it again...
If you doubt it, please do the test and report back the results.
Of course it is not Soviet Russia, and I'm aware of those activities.
It's one thing for amateurs doing those 'trainspotting' type of activities with commercial- or even professional grade equipment, but another to do it with research-grade telescopes and listening equipment.
Obviously the amateurs are basically unstoppable, and are getting the same level of open information that any foreign agent can get by looking in the open. Nothing new is lost and there is no purpose in chasing the amateurs.
However, we're talking about professional astronomers with both higher-grade knowledge, much higher-grade equipment (and likely operating under at least partial govt funding for the project or equipment), and operating under some regulations and laws. It is silly to expect that being noticed breaking those laws or regs would go un-addressed.
But, as stated above, if you feel differently, feel free to do the actual test and report back your results.
Wasn't Sunspot a solar observatory? Wouldn't its telescope be set up for light levels that would make viewing anything on the ground rather problematic?
