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Are you sure?

The Pentagon doesn’t like much of anything to be known about its satellites. The Vera Rubin Observatory will likely make awkward eye contact with some of them. Many of them are telescopes in their own right, but instead of tilting up toward the sky, they point down at Earth. … Each time the telescope were to take one of its 30-second tile images of the sky, the file would be immediately encrypted, without anyone looking at it first, and then sent on to a secure facility in California. … Three days and eight hours later, the entire tile image would be released to astronomers, untouched by black marker or any other technology of redaction. By then, the spy satellites would likely have gone somewhere else. They are elusive, after all. Their orbits are irregular, and they shift direction often. Not even the world’s most accomplished astronomers would be able to infer their present locations from a line of light streaking through a three-day-old image.

When a Telescope Is a National-Security Risk: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/12/vera-rub...