Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vladimir-y 3555 days ago
I think there should be a chance to track down the trail of a missile event in case of a cloudy weather, at least partially.
1 comments

Publically and commercially available imaginary (google earth, DigitalGlobe, etc.) just couldn’t see anything.

They only sense some visible light, and/or near IR (a.k.a. short-wave infrared). You can view some specs there: https://www.digitalglobe.com/resources/satellite-information The clouds are completely opaque in those spectrum, so the land below clouds is completely invisible from those satellites. And the segment of the missile trail above the clouds is very volatile, there’re strong winds there.

Nothing can be seen on those images. And in the video uploaded by Netherlands’ public prosecution office, they told satellite imaginary between 16 and 21 of July is unusable, because clouds.

I didn't mean publicly and commercially available imaginary, but military, very well focused on the specific tasks.
Why are you certain military has those thermal images?

As far as I know, for many of their tasks (such as detecting missile launches) an infrared MASINT is sufficient.

If that’s the case, the system doesn’t produce images at all.

I'm not familiar with such kind of stuff, the point is - I'm sure they do have strong evidences but for some reason those evidences are not yet revealed.