Whatever civilians believe isn't of great importance.
You have a high opinion of state analysts. There have been notable failures in the last few decades, and it’s hard to believe they were all intentional failures.
Statistically they're much less likely to be wrong than us. Now, I also understand that nobody is perfect.
We can't say, though, until the secrets are uncovered.
At Nellis I saw one of these temporary shelters for sensitive aircraft with an overhead image of a different aircraft printed on the top.
If the centerline didn't extend under the covering, I'd be sure that is what we are looking at in the enhanced photo.
Why wouldn't they paint such a detail on it? If they went to the lengths of painting the aircraft (as opposed to just covering it) then presumably they want it to be credible.
I'm no expert in this stuff but to me the shadow of the plane matches other shadows pretty well, and also the shadow off the side of the hangar is light and looks like the rib structure, rather than solid so the roof is probably not solid. That seems much harder to fake.
You can also see the roof beams over the plane. Although that kind of detail could be painted on or come through the canvass if it wasn't perfectly tight.
The shelters are mobile. It wouldn't be practical to paint the runway/taxiway lines on it, and I don't know how you'd get them to line up from different angles.
E-ink.
Like a satellite? (Agree this would fail with multiple satellites.)
Look at the top of the wall shadow. The canvas/whatever material isn't attached at the peak and is sagging, and you can see the shadow of the top portion of the arch above it.
I'd say they pulled the cover back to the end and it's hanging over the side.
Actually, that's probably not even be a 'wall' shadow, but just the roof covering hanging. Which would sag but otherwise look like a wall.
With the proliferation of private imaging satellites in the last decade, this might be less doable than it used to be.
The only things getting released in hi-res are the things they don't mind you (or want you) seeing.
Especially if it's of a military operating area, let alone a site as infamous as Area 51.
But in this instance, it's a US company.
They didn't get "caught out". It's an acceptable or even intentional release, rubberstamped by the overseers, likely of the NGA flavor.
And since the jet was there on multiple days, it's almost like they wanted countries with less than full satellite coverage to have time to get a peek.
If you are talking about EO satellites, China is already launching them.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.economictimes.com/news/intern...
If I remember correctly $3k per 30 seconds @ 30fps.
Synthetic-aperture radar is making the Earth’s surface watchable 24/7 https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2022/01/27/sy...
Stealth for jets isn't primarily designed for plan view. (Referring to radar cross section isn't just a generic use of the term for "detectable area of return".)
Even if it was stealthy from above, it would be easy to identify and defeat, especially on the ground: just look for the plane-shaped area without a ground return.
Or separately, a pair of co-orbital following satellites would entirely defeat all (publicly known) radar stealth (with the transmitter offset from the receiver). The US admittedly has similar pairs of these for "scientific purposes". I assume the military/IC have access or have their own.
And synthetic aperture radar can be disguised such that its nearly indistinguishable from background noise. It's one of the features that makes it superior to old school dish radar. That's not even a secret. It's currently deployed throughout the military: ground, sea, and air. Space based platforms probably had it first.
10x distance requires 100x the signal.
When it comes to being stealthy from above, jets bank to turn. Pilots can handle much higher g loads vertically than horizontally.
So the transmit power is the same as background noise and you can still get useful radar pictures out of it? Amazing. I roughly know you can recover repeating signals that are below the noise floor, but still amazing.
As satellites need to detect returns bounced off the ground hundreds of miles away they have some hard minimums for high resolution images vs aircraft or ground stations. 10x distance needs 100x the signal.
It was a very common thing to see a few them take off in the morning during breakfast just before going off to school. Especially Draken made such a glorious sound when taking off:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7L7_3cwptk (remind yourself that this is a 1955-1959 aircraft when you see it taking off)
Fast forward to now and its likely I saw the contrail of an aircraft with a scramjet This is like what I saw but there was a gap between each button mushroom. https://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/a2712a44ce6c....
Some call it doughnuts on ropes which might be something called pulse detonation?
(the F-16XL is a very interesting story and would have been an interesting airframe to explore! It's sort of like the relationship between the F-15E and the F-15, a heavier fighter-bomber airframe built on the F-16 airframe.)
But people are over-thinking it here. There's not enough information in the photo to determine (other than the aircraft isn't white).
There's enough that I can say it's not an F-16XL. The mystery aircraft is much larger - 20 meters long x 15 meters wingspan, vs the F-16XL at 16m x 10m.
Sure, but surely that was then and now is now.
Surely in today's world, you are increasingly fighting a loosing battle if you think you can play whack-a-mole with things passing overhead ?
With every day, week and year that passes, more and more things get launched into space by both friend and foe.
If you continue operating on the premise that you think you can hide every time a non-national satellite passes overhead then surely you are only playing a loosing game where eventually you can't get any work done because you're hiding all the time from birds overhead ?
A bit like checkmate in chess. Eventually the king is surrounded and can't go anywhere without being intercepted.
Also, it's "lose" x2 (sorry, the wrong word makes it hard to read). I'll remove this line if you could fix please.
I extend my profuse apologies for my keyboard fat fingers.
Regrettably there seems to be a time-delay on edits on HN, I no longer have an edit link to use.
It's possible that this is an existing aircraft modified to test alternate aerodynamic configurations similar to the F-15 STOL. Alternately it could be a flight-ready version of one of the tailless NGAD designs.
proportions are different
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Saab_SK_35C_Draken_(Drago...
_SE-DXP810.jpg){kind=link}
and if anything we have various candidates like this one https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42480/mysterious-steal...
>nothing like this ever gets "caught out" by a satellite
there is nothing secret in a 3m resolution image of a new gen fighter given that its shape looks in that resolution like any other modern aerial development platform.
Draken: 15.35 metres long, 9.42 metres wide. Mystery aircraft: 19.8 metres long, 15.2 metres wide.
That kinda assumes that there are gaps in the coverage of surveilance. That might have been practically true, but what makes it so? Couldn’t an adversary in response to such measures park their surveilance satelites in a geostat or near-geostat orbit? Or step up the number of surveilance sats such that they barelly leave any gaps?
This is what the Earth looks like from a geostationary orbit
The image you linked were made by a weather monitoring satelite. It was optimised to capture a wide are of the globe. This is clearly not the type of lens you would use to surveil military activity. It is not even the right modality to capture radar signals.
> A geostationary satellite with a similar resolution is simply not possible to build and launch in this age.
I think I will have to read up on that specifically more. I was aware how far GEO is, but I don't understand what makes the optics impossible. (Clearly it is as you say, all the sources agree with you.) Thank you!
https://warisboring.com/secret-military-aircraft-possibly-ex...
I have had acquaintances and a grad school mentor that worked on projects out at the remote test site (among other facilities). They had very, very good situational awareness about what was overhead and when, and established & practiced procedures on sanitizing things before anything got to where it could image the site. We also have decades of lessons-learned on things like heat signatures where airplanes were parked, such that their shape could be divined even when the test article was safely ensconced in a hanger.
We also practiced (and I would assume still practice) a variety of denial & deception activities to foil all manner of collectors and confuse the opposition, from RF to visual to various MASINT measures. One example is the Wet Site at China Lake, which was covertly built to assess the RCS of various maritime platforms (most famously Sea Shadow). When Soviet birds went overhead the radar dishes were pointed in a different direction and radiating on misleading frequences. The dirt spoil and vehicle tracks from the concealed construction of the test facility's saltwater pond was hidden like the tunnels in The Great Escape. Cool stuff.