Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image

https://twitter.com/johnmcelhone8/status/1600683623250030593

by johnmcelhone • 4 years ago

809 216 4 years ago

twitter.com

kevmoo1• 4 years ago

This is peek internet. Amazing!

CalRobert• 4 years ago

That's not how you spell... Nevermind. Well done.

dboreham• 4 years ago

Perhaps parent crafted a subtle pun?

omnibrain• 4 years ago

In my opinion peek internet was either the shoes in salad guy or the flagpole with only sky visible.

ChuckNorris89• 4 years ago

I believe it's exactly how 4chan would keep finding Shia LeBeouf's flags shown on webcam he was was hiding at remote locations.

Traubenfuchs• 4 years ago

With added train sounds and honking I believe. Excellent work!

mc32• 4 years ago

Sounds like an old Hawai’i 5-0 plot.

nomel2• 4 years ago

This was downvoted probably from lack of context. They used the sound of honking to find the exact location of the webcam.

sp332• 4 years ago

*Hangar

rob742• 4 years ago

It's "hangar", not "hanger", dammit!

cf100clunk• 4 years ago

I thought the article was going to tell us about a secret clothes closet aboard the new bomber.

rognjen• 4 years ago

Jeff Attwood replied exactly that.

darknavi• 4 years ago

Note to self: Always, always, ALWAYS strip exif data.

Kiboneu2• 4 years ago

You’ve confused the data with the metadata.

Denvercoder9• 4 years ago

Exif data is the metadata of the image.

riffic• 4 years ago

metadata is actually a form of data, believe it or not.

a1369209993• 4 years ago

I assumed that was the joke? If they're finding the location based on the stars in the image, you'd need to strip out the actual image data (not metadata) to prevent that.

lortrq• 4 years ago

I would like to know what else is embedded in digital pictures, similar to the printer yellow dots, except it will be undetectable.

colechristensen• 4 years ago

Sensor noise has been used to successfully identify the camera used to take a picture. No embedded features just the physical characteristics of sensors being individual enough to identify.

nomel2• 4 years ago

Couldn't the same conclusion be reached, without? That plane flying overhead, center, would probably make things much easier.

IIAOPSW• 4 years ago

Always, always, ALWAYS black out the sky.

PebblesRox• 4 years ago

Plot twist: they replaced the sky with a different starry background.

boardwaalk• 4 years ago

I mean, they livestreamed the rollout on YouTube on the Edward’s AFB YouTube channel and said it was at NG’s Palmdale facility (paraphrasing). I’m not sure any of this was a secret…

bri3d• 4 years ago

This is acknowledged by the author: https://twitter.com/johnmcelhone8/status/1600683636029652993

Which I think is also why the thread is so X-marks-the-spot / parallel-reconstruction-y. I think it's more of a "here's the kind of thing we can do with these star-matching tools, applied to an interesting image as an example" than an expose.

bee_rider• 4 years ago

Also the Airforce and Northrop Grumman must be familiar with the idea of celestial navigation. And the shot was clearly taken in the evening on purpose (I assume, at least, that a PR shot has to justify being taken outside of maximum daylight).

They probably want it to feel vaguely spacey for the sci-fi vibes.

They’ve got at least as good star charts as the rest of us, so if they really wanted to be jokers they could photoshop some stars in, make it look like it is flying over an adversary’s country…

avalys• 4 years ago

Not only that, they had three bombers (B1, B2, and B52) fly over during the live stream of the unveiling that could be tracked live on commercial flight tracking websites. This simply wasn’t a secret at all.

4gotunameagain6• 4 years ago

This livestream is the best caricature of American culture I've seen, thank you.

It is the unveiling of a bomber, with the national anthem sung by an employee of the company who built it, as in a proper performance, while more bombers fly ahead so loudly he has to stop. Then it proceeds to have the CEO read an engineered speech from a teleprompter, completely devoid of her own existence. Followed by a hollywood action movie style reveal, with the attendees going wild, clapping and shouting for the new, shiny bomber. It is a gift that keeps on giving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chJlJgrvfBY

rootusrootus• 4 years ago

With the casual change from "34-35 degrees" to "lets draw a line at 34 degrees" followed by the "and this is where the press release was" I got the vibe that this was parallel construction. Still some good sleuthing, don't get me wrong, but still.

dsfyu404ed• 4 years ago

Also goes to show you the danger of tunnel vision.

If they flew one to some air base outside DC for the roll out the author would be shooting from the hip and who knows what facility he'd have zero'd in on. Sure it might have been the same one because "the same facility as the B2" is an easy just-so story but you don't really know with any certainty.

fourthark• 4 years ago

It doesn’t fly yet, so that narrows it down a bit.

johnmcelhone5• 4 years ago

You're right, it wasn't too difficult to guess the location without the stars. The base did happen to be right in-between the 34 and 35 degree lines (34.6 lat), and you can estimate pretty well with only one line

cossatot• 4 years ago

Little Rock AFB is a few tens of km north (34.9 deg lat) for what it's worth. There may be some others as well. The chances of getting a picture of the stars that clear in Arkansas is way lower than in the Mojave however...

lilyball• 4 years ago

"let's draw a line at 34 degrees" makes for a nice display, but presumably the actual filtering for matching bases spanned 34–35 degrees.

lambdasquirrel• 4 years ago

I don't know if I entirely buy the line on "34-35 degrees off the horizon." Unless we knew the focal length of the lens it was taken with, and which camera it was taken from, you don't actually know that. A wide-angle lens is going to have a much larger field of view than, say, a 100mm macro. And different camera systems have different angle of view for the same focal length.

4gotunameagain6• 4 years ago

both the focal length and the field of view are irrelevant, you know the angles between the stars so you can infer everything.

vilhelm_s• 4 years ago

You know what the angle between the stars in the constellation are, you don't need to know the field of view of the camera.

johnmcelhone5• 4 years ago

You don't actually need the focal length, it doesn't help accuracy that much but can help you line up the sky to the photo a bit quicker. Anyway, if we did, all that info was in the metadata anyway:

Camera: Nikon D5 F-stop: f/2.8 Exposure time: 5 sec. Focal length: 28mm Max aperture: 3

cjensen• 4 years ago

You're right. Vandenberg, Kirtland, Canon, Altus, and Little Rock are all matches for the latitude and there is no text explaining them away. Even the "it must be California because Northrup" is both (a) debatable and (b) doesn't exclude Vandenberg.

supergirl• 4 years ago

misleading. was more like:

* he got the approximate latitude from the stars (34 or 35)

* independently, he found the most plausible airbase based on other information and then noticed that the base is indeed around that latitude

johnmcelhone5• 4 years ago

The process can still be done using entirely the star pattern and no Google Maps. There wasn't any reason to exclude other information I could use, so I didn't.

calvinmorrison• 4 years ago

This has only been bested by the 4chan takedown of the Shia LaBeouf's anti-trump flag, which was put up in a random location with a live stream.

"On March 8, the artists, abandoning the idea of a public webcam, raised a white flag, emblazoned with the words “He Will Not Divide Us,” in an “unknown location.” The livestream showed only the flag and the expanse of sky behind it. 4Chan and 8Chan (the forum where discussions that are banned from 4Chan go) snapped into action.... They used the star patterns visible behind the flag at night and the paths of planes flying overhead to confirm the location. A troll who lived nearby drove around honking until the noise was audible on the livestream. On the night of March 10, a group raided the site, took down the flag, and replaced it with a Pepe the Frog T-shirt and a “Make America Great Again” hat. The stream soon went dark again."

amiga386• 4 years ago

Agreed. Here are the full details: https://youtu.be/vw9zyxm860Q?t=15

Victerius• 4 years ago

Impressive.

Now do it without using a computer, the old fashioned way, with books, paper maps, star charts, slide rulers, sextants, compasses, and pens. I'm sure some people would be able to.

daveslash3• 4 years ago

This is very cool sleuthing. Really enjoyed the walkthrough.

Though, if you would have asked me, I would have guessed Lancaster/Palmdale, because I know (a) That's where the unveiling was (b) I have seen B-1's fly over me while driving in Palmdale and (c) I know Edwards and a bunch of other spacey stuff is there. I feel like Captain Kirk looking for whales and saying "I think we'll find what we're looking for at the Cetacean Institute in Sausalito" - a far less methodical or impressive approach.

mrexroad2• 4 years ago

Ahem, not to be that person… but I think you mean Admiral Kirk :) Either way, it’s a perfect reference.

daveslash3• 4 years ago

You sir, are correct. Thank you for the correction! Please be that person. Btw, my wife and I were able to visit the Monterrey Bay aquarium for the first time this past November -- and I would just not shut up with the references. My wife loved them, but also was a bit over them by the end.

vba6163• 4 years ago

Do you mean B-1 or B-2? I thought the B-21 was intended as a successor to the B-2, only cheaper. Also, they look the same to me.

daveslash3• 4 years ago

I'm sorry, yes... I meant the B-2, not the Rockwell B-1 Lancer. You are correct. We were driving through Palmdale and I saw one of the B-2 flying wings cruise over the freeway on approach. Was very very cool to see.... But thank you for the correction. B-2, not B-1.

mk_stjames2• 4 years ago

I feel like the entire thread should have led off with "This is in fact a publicly known hangar in Palmdale and this was known as public information as soon as the unveiling event occurred, and thus this is just an exercise to show how locating the spot could have been possible from just this photo as a technical demonstration."

Because I guarantee there are going to be a hundred clickbait articles by various 'news' sites now in the next few days about the MASSIVE SECURITY BREACH of the USAF and how US SECRETS have been EXPOSED so and and so forth. When nothing about this is actually the case.

johnmcelhone5• 4 years ago

I did mention this later in the thread - was just a fun experiment to see if locating it was possible if we didn't know

Sporktacular3• 4 years ago

Sure, but the reason you didn't lead with that, and also the reason you did this for a secretive aircraft and not a new campervan is clicks, no?

_dain_• 4 years ago

This trick happened for real with the HWNDU stunt back in 2017. 4channers found the flag based on the stars in the livestream, along with matching aircraft contrails to flight radar maps.

https://youtu.be/vw9zyxm860Q

chasd002• 4 years ago

remember when 4chan figured out the location of a terrorist training camp from one of their PR photos and called in a literal airstrike? I like how 4chan is sometimes described as weaponized autism.

https://imgur.com/N7DwWP1?r

IfOnlyYouKnew• 4 years ago

I feel like when you diss journalists, it should generally be for something they actually did wrong, not preemptively based on your imagination.

If they are so terrible, there should be no need to invent stuff.

When people read something like this post, and they are predisposed to the idea, it’ll reinforce their skepticism of „the mainstream media“. If you want to test yourself, make a bet of how many media outlets will run with the story in the manner outlined above, then check in a few days. My prediction: you won’t see it in the NYT, WSJ, BBC, or on CNN.

mk_stjames2• 4 years ago

I put 'news' in quotes for this reason. I wasn't as much implying that this would be actual news, but instead would be used in clickbait articles on lesser publications. I admit I am being hypothetical, but this does reflect observation on how these kinds of discussions has been get picked up and spread and thus has made me want to avoid such writing style.

leoh• 4 years ago

Right. It should be my responsibility to guard everything I say or write from lazy morons.

runjake• 4 years ago

It's pretty clearly an exercise in astronavigation.

The livestream event itself mentioned it was taking place at the Northrop facility in Palmdale.

This author is not responsible for what clickbait farms do.

Aside: I'm not even sure this plane will end up doing flight testing somewhere secret in Nevada. They may just do it out of Edwards South Base, which is an "interesting" location not many in the public know about.

twelvechairs• 4 years ago

Also all they do is cut it down to a wide band that covers 12 or so states, then compare against known bases (not shown) to narrow it down

tablespoon• 4 years ago

It's pretty clearly an exercise in astronavigation.

Off topic, but it would be really cool if someone build a hobbyist astronavigationsystem using a something like a Raspberry Pi and a camera with a fisheye lens. Sort of an amateur https://timeandnavigation.si.edu/multimedia-asset/nortronics....

runlaszlorun• 4 years ago

I hadn’t realized that much of the public doesn’t know Edwards. Then again, I’m a SoCal native with a father who was an aerospace engineer…

godels_theorem• 4 years ago

I'm not so sure.

It is very interesting--and newsworthy--how difficult it is to be anonymous on the internet. Any person, place, or thing can be "doxxed" by seemingly innocuous background details.

dylan604• 4 years ago

People have been doing photo analysis for a long long time, and have gotten quite good at doing geolocation based on details in the background that the average viewer ignores. Spy agencies are especially good at it. There's many a spy movie that offers glimpses into this, but The Good Shepard comes to mind.

Even as a joking kind of thing, the opposite has been done. There's a famous exchange between Neil DeGrasse Tyson and James Cameron about how the sky in the movie Titanic was wrong. Cameron accepted the challenge, and on a remastered version had the sky replaced to be historically accurate.

It's a game to some people. It's a challenge. It's self rewarding in this case, sometimes there might be actual rewards of sorts. Hell, I've spent more hours than I'd like to admit on Nasa's website where you use the images taken by the astronauts on the space station and align them on the globe. I got nothing out of it other than being entertained by the challenge, learned about some new places on the globe when I would try to find out why that place was interesting to the astronaut to snap that particular image, etc.

breck• 4 years ago

There's a famous exchange between Neil DeGrasse Tyson and James Cameron about how the sky in the Titanic was wrong. Cameron accepted the challenge, and on a remastered version had the sky replaced to be historically accurate.

Very interesting! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B6jSfRuptY&t=110s

(Interesting comment for a number of reasons. Thanks!)

evilotto• 4 years ago

There was an xkcd comic set in the future with the exact date calculated from the stars. https://xkcd-time.fandom.com/wiki/Astronomy

Mogzol• 4 years ago

It's a game to some people. It's a challenge.

GeoWizard on youtube has a whole series where he tries to pinpoint the exact locations of pictures sent to him by fans. Pretty fun to watch:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_japiE6QKWqMVC3JbyONau_0...

mschuster912• 4 years ago

It's a game to some people. It's a challenge.

And for some, it crosses all lines of ethics and morals, like the stalker that deduced the location of a pop idol by looking at the reflection of a building in her eyes [1]. That's utterly crazy.

[1] https://sea.mashable.com/article/6776/a-stalker-found-a-japa...

kyawzazaw• 4 years ago

so interesting

mierle• 4 years ago

Wow, it's cool to see astrometry.net get put to use! I worked on astrometry.net back in undergrad and grad school. If you have questions about how it works, I can answer them.

How does it work? astrometry.net uses 4-star combinations to define codes, then indexes the codes on the celestial sphere. The particulars of each of these phases matter, but that's the basic idea.

tetris11• 4 years ago

is A,B,C,D in the database the same as D,C,B,A? Or does order infer orientation?

gmiller1234566• 4 years ago

It uses a hash which is scale and orientation independent. A lot of the details are described in this paper:

https://arxiv.org/abs/0910.2233

moloch-hai• 4 years ago

Order cannot infer anything. Only people, animals, and some programs can infer. Inanimate facts can at most imply.

antognini• 4 years ago

I used to be in astronomy and I always thought astrometry.net was one of the coolest tools in the field. It feels about as close to magic as you can get.

dakr• 4 years ago

I remember my jaw dropping while sitting in a colloquium hearing about astrometry.net from David Hogg back in ...2007?

Fast forwarding a few years, we started using it at SOFIA Observatory to help speed up telescope acquisitions.

malfist2• 4 years ago

Astrometry.net is damn handy. I don't use it too much these days for myself except for annotating images, but I do have some friends just getting into astronomy and it's blind solve is amazing to help them.

Plus when I show them plate solving their minds are blown. Hugely useful tool.

mpsprd• 4 years ago

Heh. This makes me remember how the same technique was used in the "he will not divide us" trolling campaign to locate a video feed of a flag. Internet Historian has a video about IIRC.

saraton1n• 4 years ago

This reminds me of the Elon plane tracking dude. Such a neat use of technology and know-how.

NikolaNovak• 4 years ago

Related unrelated question : how come this is public?

F117 was a dark skunk project shown years after being operational. That made sense to me for a super secret project with wildly new technologies and capabilities.

I don't understand the announcements of such projects from the vision stage, with the details of capability, purpose, strategy, photos,etc.

Is it commoditized sufficiently? Is it deterrence? Is there enough misinformation?

ForHackernews• 4 years ago

I've read some things that suggest the B-21 may not offer radical new capabilities (over say, the B-2) but it will be way way cheaper to build and operate.

There were only 21 B-2s ever built. The Air Force has already ordered 100 B-21s.

dragonwriter4• 4 years ago

There were only 21 B-2s ever built. The Air Force has already ordered 100 B-21s.

Planned, not ordered. Just like they initially planned 130+ B-2s, which Congress eventually cut to 21.

kevin_thibedeau• 4 years ago

That number will shrink. There were supposed to be 100+ B2s and no B1Bs.

jabl2• 4 years ago

From what I've read (which I guess is largely speculation, although by people more familiar with the topic than me), the B-21 doesn't really push the envelope. The only really new thing is the airframe itself, but that largely piggybacks on stealth technology development over the past several decades (RAM coatings, shaping etc.) compared to the B-2, and not some entirely new R&D done only for the purpose of the B-21 program. The engines apparently come from the F-35, but obviously without the afterburners (an entirely sensible choice considering the F-35 is supposed to be manufactured in very large numbers and supported for a long time into the future). Electronics is supposedly stuff already developed. Etc. etc.

If true, then yes, the B-21 has potential to be relatively cheap to build and operate.

Rebelgecko• 4 years ago

The secretary of defense mentioned "deterrence" as part of the reasoning. Maybe not-so-coincidentally, the aircraft (at least as they showed it) skips the old school black paint job for one that looks more like anti-flash white[0].

Part of it is probably also that this is a refinement of an existing aircraft and not anything with drastically different capabilities-- if you're planning on war with the US, you're probably already thinking about B-2s, and if you're worried about B-2s then a B-21 isn't that different.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-flash_white

jabl2• 4 years ago

Looks more like a typical gray color that practically all Western air forces use today, than anti-flash white. I'd speculate the implications of this are:

- They plan on operating it during the day as well as night, so they need better protection against visual observation?

- The B2 was much darker due to the coating technology it used wasn't compatible with lighter grays? And operating only at night it didn't really matter?

chasd002• 4 years ago

it may be its operational capabilities are more important to keep secret. It has an unmanned mode which is very interesting to me. Does it need to be piloted by a guy in an office cube like the Predator drone or is it more autonomous?

dragonwriter4• 4 years ago

It has an unmanned mode

Maybe. “Designed to accommodate unmannef operations” is... fairly vague as a description.

dragonwriter4• 4 years ago

Related unrelated question : how come this is public?

Because trying to hide the existence of strategic bombers is expensive, ineffective, and not particularly helpful to keeping the actually secret technology they use secret.

F117 was a dark skunk project shown years after being operational

With the F-117, the shape was part of the secret sauce. The B-21 doesn’t seem to be a big departure that way.

I don't understand the announcements of such projects from the vision stage,

This wasn't announced in the vision stage, except that a new strategic bomber was being developed. The unveiling was well past vision, and competition, stages.

Is it commoditized sufficiently? Is it deterrence? Is there enough misinformation?

Deterrence is a big consideration,

jasonwatkinspdx2• 4 years ago

With the F-117, the shape was part of the secret sauce. The B-21 doesn’t seem to be a big departure that way.

The world has also changed substantially. When the F-117 was developed, being able to simulate the RF interactions with faceted geometry was ground breaking stuff. Now anyone that can afford an ANSYS license can simulate that with far, far, greater fidelity against much more complex shapes.

dotnet00• 4 years ago

There's of course the slightly conspiratorial idea that they made this public because it's obsolete compared to whatever their newest toys are and so revealing this as a show of technological superiority is fine.

influx• 4 years ago

  Kirk: Bones, did you ever hear of a doomsday machine?

  McCoy: No. I'm a doctor, not a mechanic.

  Kirk: It's a weapon built primarily as a bluff. It's never meant to be used. So strong, it 
  could destroy both sides in a war. Something like the old H-Bomb was supposed to be. 
  That's what I think this is. A doomsday machine that somebody used in a war uncounted 
  years ago. They don't exist anymore, but the machine is still destroying.

  — Star Trek: The Original Series, "The Doomsday Machine"

  Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it 
  a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?!!

  Russian Ambassador Sadesky: It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you 
  know, the Premier loves surprises.

  — Dr. Strangelove

Ferrotin2• 4 years ago

The most important benefit of the public announcement is that showing successfully completed projects like this helps the defense industry with recruitment and encourages more students to become aeronautical and mechanical engineers.

rr888• 4 years ago

Its pretty amazing some of the stories coming out of Ukraine. People posting on social media then getting blown up soon after. https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-news-exposed-mortar-c...

pifm_guy4• 4 years ago

It's worth noting that stars can be seen even in daylight with the right software.

That's because, while no individual star is visible, the exact angles between all stars is fixed, so you can do a brute force search of all possible orientations of the sky to find a matching one. In a 6 megapixel image of half blue sky, you effectively get an oversampling ratio of 3 million:1, so even with very bright sunlight obscuring the stars to the naked eye, your algorithm will pick them out.

folli• 4 years ago

Very interesting! Any links for further reading?

pifm_guy4• 4 years ago

Nope - years ago I accidentally discovered this while trying to align star images for stacking. Some of my images were taken in daylight, and I was surprised to find my rudimentary image aligner still worked just fine. Never wrote it up into a blog post.

323• 4 years ago

GPS works like that too, the GPS signal is so weak it's below the thermal noise floor when it arrives at the receiver, but you know each satellite's special signal pattern, so you just search all satellites at all positions in the noise and see if you get some correlation (a fix).

skykooler• 4 years ago

How long does this take? Could this be run on, say, a smartphone to calculate its rough position from a photo of the sky?

sva_• 4 years ago

I've never considered that but it makes perfect sense. Might try to code something up given some freetime.

teekert• 4 years ago

Omg I opened a Twitter thread and when that dreaded moment came where that black takes over the screen and I can’t even scroll back anymore… now I was able to just tap an X and keep reading! Hooray for Elon?

NotYourLawyer2• 4 years ago

Wait, this didn’t even rely on the constellations though. Get the latitude from the North Star and then look for matching air bases.

httpz• 4 years ago

I thought so too but I think you need to know the constellations first to identify the North Star in the photo.

johnmcelhone5• 4 years ago

This is correct. The brightness of the stars made them a bit difficult to identify by eye, I'm sure someone more familiar with sky charts could have done it. The constellations helped me align the sky on Stellarium (from their angles) and the north star helped me find the approximate latitude by using the angle from the horizon.

mberning• 4 years ago

I wonder how long this thing has existed. Or if it is even “current gen”. The existence of the f117 and b2 were not acknowledged for a long time.

gateorade4• 4 years ago

The existence of the b2 was always acknowledged from early in its development, just like the b21 was. The primary purpose for strategic bombers like the b21 and the b2 is deterrence, and deterrence doesn’t really work if it isn’t known about. The f117 on the other hand was a tactical aircraft that was built in anticipation of a sudden need to precisely strike a very specific target no matter how well defended. For that purpose it needed to remain unacknowledged. It was also the first stealth aircraft and presented a larger leap from existing aircraft than the b-2 did at the time.

mgarfias• 4 years ago

I mean, cool and all. But I didnt have to do that to know where it was. I stood outside that hanger (with a B-2 inside) in 1989 at Northrop's 50th anniversary airshow.

If I can remember that, from 30+ years ago, I'm pretty sure the russians/chinese/whateverese also know.

paxys• 4 years ago

The investigation breaks down halfway when you have to pull up a public list of airbase locations and google where certain jets are made.

supernova87a• 4 years ago

He seems to use the hour estimate of 1:30am being a time when very few satellites are likely overhead as a sort of confirming factor. (I guess because many satellites are sun-synchronous around noon, and the USAF would purposely time the photo to not expose the aircraft to observation).

But is that a very strong confirming factor? Is it likely that NG / USAF would be actively avoiding the potential for satellite imagery? Does it mean all the time it was being built, they avoided having it outside during the daytime?

Johnny555• 4 years ago

Does it mean all the time it was being built, they avoided having it outside during the daytime

Aren't airplanes built entirely in a hangar? Especially secret ones?

sophacles• 4 years ago

Depends on how you scope the word "build". If you mean literal assembly, of course. If you mean "the process of iterating engineering, testing and assembly" including prototyping etc (a common way to use the word build, especially in software circles) it makes more sense.

0xCMP• 4 years ago

I forget where, but there was a video I was watching that claimed the US was so far ahead in tech that instead of letting others know our capabilities we play with other countries by "accidentally" leaving things open to satellites which makes other countries trying to copy us go nuts trying to reverse engineer nonsense.

That comment was after mentioning how the "super sonic" plane built for the latest Top Gun was probably left out, on purpose, so it'd confuse adversaries on what the US is actually working on.

Ferrotin2• 4 years ago

Historically, yes, they’ve scheduled outdoor activity to avoid satellite overflight, if we’re not misled by books.

Maybe it’s not a strong factor here, because it was a few days before public announcement anyway. But you’d expect them to follow the same protocol or at least pick a more convenient time than 1:30am if they were not.

Merad• 4 years ago

Is it likely that NG / USAF would be actively avoiding the potential for satellite imagery? Does it mean all the time it was being built, they avoided having it outside during the daytime?

During the Cold War black projects like the F-117 did exactly that. IIRC they weren't necessarily limited to being out side only at night, but they were very careful about satellite orbits to make sure the secret aircraft wouldn't be caught on camera.

When the B-2 bomber was unveiled, the USAF didn't really want people to get good photos of the wing's shape due to some of the stealth technology incorporated into it. Aviation Week famously [0] got the drop on them by flying a Cessna right over the rollout. Considering how many very high quality cameras are in orbit today I imagine they put some thought into preventing Russia, China, etc. from getting good photos of the B-21.

0: https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/aircraft-propulsion/s...

UncleEntity• 4 years ago

Not just secret projects.

When I was in the 82nd Airborne we had days where we didn’t do any outside training because the Soviet spy satellites were overhead. Estimated troop strength, deployment schedules, blada, blada.

Kind of nice because they generally left us alone as long as we stayed out of sight.

postingawayonhn• 4 years ago

Is it likely that NG / USAF would be actively avoiding the potential for satellite imagery?

Yes, we still haven't seen the back of the B-21 (those at the unveiling could only view it from the front). There was also an incident when the B-2 was unveiled and a photographer flew over and got pictures of it.

asdff• 4 years ago

Yet another twitter thread that could have made an excellent blog post.

ant6n• 4 years ago

Yeah well the readers killed blogs, not the writers.

Vitaly_C• 4 years ago

Or we could save all that effort and just check the Wikipedia page... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_Plant_...

jbverschoor2• 4 years ago

Enhance already!

gmiller1234566• 4 years ago

There's a few highly suspect details in the way the author got the 34-35 degree estimate. Maybe he was just really lucky and the errors cancelled out, but don't count on using his method to produce similar results.

Polaris is about .8 degrees away from the celestial North pole, so using it alone can give a reading off by .8 degrees, and the orientation in the photo is actually nearing the worst case.

The horizon doesn't appear in the photo. I have done celestial navigation strictly as a hobby for fun, and using a sextant without a visible horizon results in a few degrees of error at best. And that's with the benefit of the sensation of gravity helping you estimate. It is theoretically possible to estimate the horizon using the man made parallel horizontal lines in the image, but the author doesn't give any indication he did that.

Additionally, the author used the angle measurement tool in Stellarium to measure the distance to another ambiguous horizon. This is incredibly odd, as just clicking on Polaris in Stellarium will tell you its elevation. But even more odd, is he would have had to explicitly set his latitude in the app in order to get that screenshot.

microsoftdoes• 4 years ago

Interesting. So do you think the author had inside information on the location?

mhh__• 4 years ago

It was publicly accessible, or so I've read at least

gmiller1234566• 4 years ago

I'm not going to speculate on what someone did or didn't know, let's give him the benefit of the doubt and just say he was really lucky. My main point was just don't expect similar results if you try it yourself.

gateorade4• 4 years ago

The fact that the b21 is being built at plant 42 in Palmdale has been public info for literal years.

relaxing• 4 years ago

The author notes in the writeup that an educated guess could be made with public details about who the manufacturer was.

gmiller1234566• 4 years ago

I extended many of the assumed parallel lines in the photo, and they all tend to converge just below and to the right of the nose of the plane. And using the known distance between two of the stars to estimate the degrees per pixel, I get a margin of error of about 4 degrees vertically estimating where the horizon is.

gmiller1234566• 4 years ago

For what it's worth, I measured the pixels between Kochab and Pherkad and got .0161 degress per pixel. Then measured from Polaris to my visual guestimate of where the horizon should be and got 34.14 deg, about half a degree off of the real location.

I'd be interested to see what others get. For those not familiar with the stars, Polaris is just a few pixels from the top edge, nearly dead center (it's close enough to the top that you can just use the top edge of the photo as a reference). If you start with a photo the same size I did (4096x2731), you can just crop the photo from top down to where you think the horizon is, then look at the size of the resulting image, multiply the vertical pixels by .0161, and post the answer below.

jaxomlotus• 4 years ago

If I were a betting man I would assume he started this exercise with the final assumed location in mind, and worked backwards from there to show how it could have been done.

baxtr• 4 years ago

That's actually what he was implying in his last tweet:

The press conference to reveal the aircraft was held here last week so we can confirm the location. A guess likely would have landed someone in the same location but fun anyway to star match. I'm sure this entire process could be done with just stars and no google maps as well

whywhywouldyou• 4 years ago

I'm sure you're correct, as the whole thing reads like "look how smart I am".

1. Extraneous details about satellites not being overhead at night -- as if government spy satellites operate on the same schedule with the same priorities as publicly known satellites.

2. Mentions things like them not scrubbing the EXIF data was a "mistake". How could it be a mistake if this was public information?

3. Says at the end "(this data is all public now)". Making it sound like he made the data public through his top notch sleuthing. It should read "this data was all public a week prior to my analysis".

sumofproducts• 4 years ago

as if government spy satellites operate on the same schedule with the same priorities as publicly known satellites.

This bit, at least, is more or less the case. Even if you spend some fuel to alter your orbit and throw people off for a bit, you can't do anything major over the course of a few hours without sci-fi engines.

mschuster912• 4 years ago

1. Extraneous details about satellites not being overhead at night -- as if government spy satellites operate on the same schedule with the same priorities as publicly known satellites.

You can bet that the US, China and Russia know about at least the orbital data of all satellites that the other nations put up.

2. Mentions things like them not scrubbing the EXIF data was a "mistake". How could it be a mistake if this was public information?

Because even what otherwise should be public domain under US copyright rules can still be censored for national security reasons - precisely to avoid OSINT research like this. What some random Twitter hobby astronomy researcher can do in their free time with basic tools, Russian and Chinese secret services can do as well.

Another fine example just how important attention to detail is with maintaining operational security.

samstave3• 4 years ago

1. What orbit sphere level do spy sats sit at?

(I worked with many sat engs from Loral and another quiet facility called Lokheed (Also you shouls look into BALL ((the actual Mason Jar company - and see how many spy sats they make)))

Anyway, I think that DEFCON needs to break this shit open....

Read all the lines, then read all the ones in-betweeen....

Serious.

greggarious• 4 years ago

I'm sure you're correct, as the whole thing reads like "look how smart I am".

It's been that way for a long time. The whole "UFO movement" had it's flames fanned by agents of foreign power who literally salivate at how many useful idiots will do the work their analysts would have done.

Some officer in the Russian equivalent of the NRO is probably gonna take that post and run with it.

jasonwatkinspdx2• 4 years ago

as if government spy satellites operate on the same schedule with the same priorities as publicly known satellites.

It's basically impossible to hide things in orbit. Hobbyists have been able to track the Misty spy satellite that has an inflatable cone to mask its optical signature. The major powers all operate space tracking radars that can spot anything up there bigger than about a baseball.

Also nearly all optical imaging sats are in sun synchronous orbits because it maximizes power generation vs solar panel size as well allows comparison of multiple days images with the same shadow angles.

How could it be a mistake if this was public information?

Well they scrubbed the data from the website so that's a pretty clear indication it was a mistake. You're oversimplifying this into a binary thing, whereas a lot of security is more of the form "this isn't foolproof but there's no need for us to make it this easy."

aksss• 4 years ago

How could it be a mistake if this was public information?

Not to pile on, but the government releases info by mistake all the time. Even simple things like doing a crappy job redacting court filings. It's just people doing this stuff, and people make mistakes all.the.time.

Guthur2• 4 years ago

This is quite the boondoggle, not a lot of change out of billion dollars per aircraft, remember that as you work yourself to death.

"Stealth" has such a limited life span of utility. Even in the 90s Serbian air defence managed to acquire and shoot down "stealth" aircraft. It required humint but that's part of a real theatre of war.

gateorade4• 4 years ago

This is objectively false though. We could take a deep dive into the relevance of the Serbian shoot down but it’s kind of irrelevant.

The fact of the matter is, stealth technology means that an aircraft needs to be significantly closer to a radar for it to be detected compared to a normal aircraft. That also means it has to be closer still for a threat radar to develop a weapons quality track. Theres not really any known radar technology that can mitigate this, it’s basic physics. It’s much easier to see an object on radar that returns orders of magnitude more energy to the radar.

Stealth does not a limited utility. In fact it’s rapidly going to become an absolute bare minimum for any tactical aircraft.

Guthur2• 4 years ago

So in the next 10-20 years we wont have any significant advances in detection technology or methodologies?

Even if, for arguments sake, the aircraft is at the moment leaps and bounds ahead of the nearest peer competitor military there is going to be limit to how effective a new coat of paint will be for the B-21 in 10 years time.

To get your monies worth from this thing you'd want a lot greater effective service life than that and without stealth the B-21 would have dramatically diminished it's dollar to effectiveness ratio.

j4ah4n• 4 years ago

Sky obfuscation to avoid stellar triangulation as a service?

14• 4 years ago

This is fun to see. Reminds me of the capture the flag done on Shia LaBeouf’s Trump protest flag that 4chan got together to figure out it’s hidden location and stole his flag and replaced it with a Trump hat. https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/celebri...

bunabhucan• 4 years ago

The flock and skysat orbits he showed are for san francisco based planet labs satellites, the vast bulk of which are in sun synchronous orbits to always take photos in daylight. The screenshots amount to "it's dark at 1:30am."

partiallypro• 4 years ago

One of my favorite internet happenings is when 4Chan (I think it was 4Chan) used stars and airplane data to get Shia LaBeouf's flag location and steal it. Not because of the political message, but because it was just entertaining and impressive in general. I think it ended up being in Tennessee somewhere. In any case, this wasn't exactly a secret, journalists were invited (though they had their cellphones confiscated at the gate, apparently.) If they really wanted, they could use obfuscation to make the sky, etc unrecognizable or in a totally different location.

sumtechguy• 4 years ago

That went on for a few months. I think he ended up sticking it on a blank wall in an airbnb. They still figured it out. Because he decided to go out and have a few drinks. Also because info is wildly leaky. It is interesting how leaky info is and how little it takes to narrow it down. Advertisers use that non intuitive fact to do browser fingerprinting.

pash• 4 years ago

Northrop Grumman announced in September that they would unveil the B-21 at Palmdale this week [0]. The location was not a secret.

0. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/09/20/251965...

wutwutwutwut• 4 years ago

Twitter thread said the same thing, or am I missing something?

IshKebab• 4 years ago

It said it at the end after tacitly implying otherwise.

pbronez• 4 years ago

Hahaha this is a neat bit of investigation but my favorite part is that the final conclusion is that the sexy new bomber is hiding……… at the Air Force base where they held the press conference announcing the new bomber!

anovikov• 4 years ago

In fact, knowing the moment photo was taken from EXIF, there was no need to "plot the line". They could point the exact location by using orientation of the stars - stellar time (assuming the horizon is level which, in the airfield, is a very very good assumption to make).

Procedure is as follows:

Right ascension of the culminating star ("celestial longitude", taken from the star catalog/star map, of any star which is right above the celestial pole/"Polar star"), is the stellar time.

Knowing date (from EXIF), you get local solar time (which is equal to the stellar time on the spring solstice day, then makes a 24 hour loop over the year).

Difference between local time found this way and UTC time (taken from EXIF), gives longitude, because the Earth is round.

If EXIF does not contain the time zone, that gives 3 points in the U.S., one for each time zone, but it must be super easy to pick one. But most probably, EXIF contains the time zone.

tempodox• 4 years ago

Nit: It's “hangar”, not “hanger”.

reportgunner• 4 years ago

Why would anyone hang a B-21?

jwally• 4 years ago

This is the EXACT reason the government is never dispels alien sightings with "oh, that was us, not aliens! lol".

If you say tic-tac was lens-flare, the Chinese govt will figure out how to obsolete the F22 targeting system in a week :-)

Hyperbole for sure but amazing how much info you can get from seemingly innocent data leaks.

Loose lips sink ships...

libaznezba• 4 years ago

Is there any software library that can find approximate gps location of photo just from knowing the date & time of the image and knowing the horizon? I saw somewhere that bombers in 2nd world war were using stars for navigation.

immmmmm• 4 years ago

finally a plane that can bomb climate change away.

Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image

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