Tracking Top Secret Spy Satellites

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Geoff Manaugh, The Atlantic: Tracking Earth's Secret Spy Satellites

With the right gear and know-how, anyone can keep tabs on the clandestine ”moons” that surround our planet.

Behind the night sky is another sky, one obscured by legal darkness and criss-crossed by satellites we’re not meant to know exist. This is the “other night sky,” as geographer-turned-artist Trevor Paglen calls it, a world of clandestine moons and unacknowledged orbiters. Kept out of official reach by defense and intelligence services, this hidden sky nonetheless can be uncovered—if you have the gear to track and observe it.

One of Paglen’s many projects over the past ten years has been documenting this surreptitious astronomical realm, where surveillance spacecraft, military communications platforms, and rumored electromagnetic weapons drift in a state of near-invisibility. Many of these “black” satellites, as Paglen refers to them, are launched as National Reconnaissance Office missions, which means they receive the prefix NROL, or National Reconnaissance Office Launch. As websites such as “Gunter’s Space Page” and “Spaceflight 101” readily show, there are many NRO launches planned for the years to come, including NROL-61, scheduled for a July 28th launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and NROL-79, slotted for December, to name only two.

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WNU Editor: As an amateur astronomer I have the lost count on the times that I have spotted a satellite in the night skies ... it is a very normal occurrence. But it is those occasions when I spot something totally out of the ordinary .... i.e. following a satellite changing course (it has happened only twice in my life) .... that catches my breath and makes me wonder on what do we really have up there.