[parsimo2010]

This satellite’s mission is soil readings. Most scientists are not part of the intelligence community. They may have noticed anomalous readings and excluded them from their analysis, but they don’t really have anyone to talk to about the military implications. Plus, while this is cool that you can detect this interference with a science satellite, the major space powers all have military and intelligence satellites that can map the interference at greater precision, so the NASA scientists can pretty much ignore this unless they are particularly interested in the soil readings in this part of the world.

[frandroid]

It's not impossible that the Pentagon could have thought "alright, we want these readings. is there a civilian use for this kind of data and decided to see if a civilian project could be sprung up... Though that's more of a Cold War conceit. These days they would just do it themselves, it's probably an easy and cheap project.

[robocat]

Just as there are commercial earth imagery satellites, I would expect there are commercial RF source detection satellites. There are obvious sales channels to hedge funds, countries, militaries, and commercial transmission operators (searching for causes of interference).

Hedge funds is the fun one: detecting economic activity and growth (independent of official government figures).

[g4zj]

Thank you for that explanation. It was very helpful. :)