Re: [APML] OT: Satellite orbital taxonomy

[Matt BenDaniel <matt@starmatt.com>]

At 11:57 PM 5/23/2002 -0400, Matt BenDaniel wrote:
>At 11:19 PM 5/23/2002 -0400, Matt BenDaniel wrote:
>>At 08:38 PM 5/23/2002 -0500, Paul M. Rybski wrote:
>>>     If you wanted to look down on an enemy's installations 24/7 but didn't want him to successfully detect you by diffuse reflection off of satellite surfaces or by Kelvin retroreflection off of your solid state detectors when he painted you with a pulsed laser and looked for reflections synchronously at the time of the expected return pulse, what would you hide the satellite behind?  (Hint:  What would make you invisible most of the time but glint brightly at only one orientation with respect to you and to the Sun?)  (Another hint: This object was the brightest infrared source in the sky -- after the Sun, of course -- at 10 microns.  How could it be so bright in the IR but nearly invisible in the visible?)
>>
>>Use highly reflective flat surfaces. A cube shape would do it. You must keep the faces from pointing straight down to Earth. The satellite is bright at 10 microns because there is a 10 micron background glow in every direction.
>
>No, no, the last part of my answer is wrong. If it reflected background radiation it would look just like the background. It must be blackbody radiation.

Doh. No, that can't be it either. Blackbody radiation at 10u would not be intense. How does the satellite downlink? 10u RF (highly encrypted of course)?

--
Matt BenDaniel
matt@starmatt.com
http://starmatt.com


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