This will be a perfect breeding ground for UFO conspiracy theorists. When the big new $1 billion telescope built by the US turns on next year, every picture it takes will be sent to an unnamed US security agency before anyone else can see it.
This makes sense: the US government, who paid for this telescope, is trying to keep the location of its spy satellites secret. The setup is actually *better* than for a previous telescope:
"You would get back your image, and all the military assets would be blacked out. It looked like someone had streaked a marker across it, and it had a huge impact on the science that people were able to do.”
What's funny is that the astronomer negotiating with the US about the new telescope, the Vera Rubin observatory, was never told the identity of who he was talking to, or what agency they worked for. (Three guesses.)
This agency will contribute $5 million for a dedicated network to securely transmit data. Each time the telescope takes a 30-second picture of part of the sky, the file will be immediately encrypted and sent to a secure facility in California. An automated system will compare this image with previous images of the same part of the sky. It will cut out small “postage stamp” pictures of any new objects it finds: asteroids, exploding stars, spy satellites, or... whatever. It will remove some of these postage stamps and, one minute later, send the rest, together with their coordinates, to an alert service available to astronomers worldwide.
3 days and 8 hours later, the entire image will be released to astronomers, unredacted.
Or so they say. 😏
Details here:
@johncarlosbaez I'm confused. The system as described only delays images of satellites by a few days, but at the same time tells everyone explicitly what was redacted those 3 days later (you can run the same comparison on the published images and compare the results with previously published alerts). So this only makes sense if what is protected are images of events, and only for a short time. Do I misunderstand?
@robryk - The Atlantic article is indeed confusing on this point, but seems to claim that spy satellites change course enough that knowing their location 3 days ago would not help enemies of the US.
"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."
Of course, what matters is not the world's most accomplished astronomers, but the world's most accomplished spy agencies!