[tt] NYT: Satellite Spotters Glimpse Secrets, and Tell Them

Tue Feb 5 21:44:04 UTC 2008

Satellite Spotters Glimpse Secrets, and Tell Them
New York Times, 8.2.5
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/science/space/05spotters.html

By [46]JOHN SCHWARTZ

When the government announced last month that a top-secret spy
satellite would, in the next few months, come falling out of the
sky, American officials said there was little risk to people because
satellites fall out of orbit fairly frequently and much of the
planet is covered by oceans.

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Web Links
[48]Visual Satellite Observer's Home Page
[49]The Mailing List for Visual Satellite Observers
[50]Heavens-Above

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But they said precious little about the satellite itself.

Such information came instead from Ted Molczan, a hobbyist who
tracks satellites from his apartment balcony in Toronto, and fellow
satellite spotters around the world. They have grudgingly become
accustomed to being seen as "propeller-headed geeks" who "poke their
finger in the eye" of the government's satellite spymasters, Mr.
Molczan said, taking no offense. "I have a sense of humor," he said.

Mr. Molczan, a private energy conservation consultant, is the best
known of the satellite spotters who, needing little more than a pair
of binoculars, a stop watch and star charts, uncover some of the
deepest of the government's expensive secrets and share them on the
Internet.

Thousands of people form the spotter community. Many look for
historical relics of the early space age, working from publicly
available orbital information. Others watch for phenomena like the
distinctive flare of sunlight glinting off bright solar panels of
some telephone satellites. Still others are drawn to the secretive
world of spy satellites, with about a dozen hobbyists who do most of
the observing, Mr. Molczan said.

In the case of the mysterious satellite that is about to plunge back
to earth, Mr. Molczan had an early sense of which one it was,
identifying it as USA-193, which gave out shortly after reaching
space in December 2006. It is said to have been built by the
[52]Lockheed Martin Corporation and operated by the secretive
[53]National Reconnaissance Office.

Another hobbyist, John Locker of Britain, posted photos of the
satellite on a Web site, [54]galaxypix.com.

John E. Pike, director of [55]GlobalSecurity.org, a private group in
Alexandria, Va., that tracks military and space activities, said the
hobbyists exemplified fundamental principles of openness and of the
power of technology to change the game.

"It has been an important demystification of these things," Mr. Pike
said, "because I think there is a tendency on the part of these
agencies just to try to pretend that they don't exist, and that
nothing can be known about them."

But the spotters are also pursuing a thoroughly unusual pastime, one
that calls for long hours outside, freezing in the winter and
sweating in the summer, straining to see a moving light in the sky
and hoping that a slip of the finger on the stopwatch does not
delete an entire night's work. And for the adept, there is math.
Lots of math.

"It's somewhat time consuming and tedious," Mr. Molczan said,
acknowledging that the precise and methodical activities might seem,
to the uninitiated, "a close approximation to work."

When a new spy satellite is launched, the hobbyists will collaborate
on sightings around the world to determine its orbit, and even guess
at its function, sharing their information through the e-mail
network SeeSat-L, which can be found via the Web site
[56]satobs.org.

From his 23rd-floor balcony, or the roof of his 32-floor building,
Mr. Molzcan will peer through his binoculars at a point in the sky
he expects the satellite to cross, which he locates with star
charts. When the moving dot appears, he determines its direction and
the distance it travels across the patch of sky over time, which he
can use to calculate its speed.

Mr. Molzcan declined a request to visit him in Toronto and to be
photographed for this article, saying: "No offense intended, but
this is beginning to sound like more of a human interest story than
one about the substance of the hobby. My preference is for the
latter. Also, I prefer not to have photos of myself published."

Mr. Locker, who favors a telescope for his camerawork, said that
people like him and Mr. Molczan were not, as he put it, "nerdy buffs
who lie on our backs and look into the sky and try to undermine
governments." Spotting, he said, is simply a hobby.

"There are people who look at train timetables and go watch trains,"
he said. People are drawn to what interests them, he said, and "it's
what draws people to any hobby."

While recent news coverage has focused on the current satellite's
threat to people when it falls from above, that threat is,
statistically, very small. Even when the space shuttle Columbia
broke up over Texas five years ago and rained debris over two
states, no one on the ground was injured.

Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the [57]National Security Council,
noted that 328 satellites had come down in the past five years
without injury to anyone. While Mr. Johndroe declined to divulge
much about the current satellite aside from the fact that it carries
no nuclear material, he said that the government would take
responsibility in the remote chance of damage or injury.

The government's relationship with the hobbyists is not a
comfortable one. Spokesmen for the National Reconnaissance Office
have stated that they would prefer the hobbyists not publish their
information, and suggest that foreign countries try to hide their
activities when they know an eye in the sky will be passing
overhead.

The satellite spotters acknowledge that this may be so, though they
doubt that such tactics are effective. Mr. Molczan said he believed
that the hobbyists hurt no one but that "you can't say with absolute
certainty what effect you're having."

Mr. Pike said the officials who complained about the hobbyists
"don't like it, but they've got to lump it." Despite the many clever
ways that the spy agencies try to minimize the likelihood that their
satellites will be spotted, he said, they will be. And that, he
said, is a valuable warning: a world with so many eyes on the skies
renders deep secrets shallow.

"If Ted can track all these satellites," Mr. Pike said, "so can the
Chinese."

References

46. 
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/john_schwartz/index.html?inline=nyt-per
47. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/science/space/05spotters.html?ref=science#secondParagraph
48. http://www.satobs.org/satintro.html
49. http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
50. http://heavens-above.com/
51. http://video.on.nytimes.com/
52. 
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/lockheed_martin_corporation/index.html?inline=nyt-org
53. 
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_reconnaissance_office/index.html?inline=nyt-org
54. http://galaxypix.com/
55. http://GlobalSecurity.org/
56. http://satobs.org/