Articles like this really strike home how huge this world is. I feel ignorant when my first thought is that we should be able to locate a cruise ship in the ocean, but I clearly underestimate how huge this world really is. It's also hits home when entire planes like the Malaysian airline plane can disappear and literally no one knows what happened to it.
I find it difficult to believe that the large governments, in control of many imaging satellites, could not find something like this if they were so inclined.
Take an enormous number of photos of the region at the right resolution, and have software eliminate the boring (empty) photos and flag the interesting ones (contain something of the right size) for human review. Heck, I bet it could even exclude known shipping lanes to minimize false positives.
There are 510 trillion square miles of surface area on the planet. Just.. imagine the logistical challenge of taking and storing these pictures, let alone the _process_ of obtaining them. It's almost impossible to achieve anything like a "snapshot" of the surface; because of this, it's almost useless for locating moving objects on the surface.
You could, conceivably, completely miss the object in your imaging passes; or the satellite you have tasked for a particular ground track has an error in it's imaging sensor or downlink equipment, meaning you're missing a huge chunk of data for a while. You might also have to move the satellites around occasionally making imaging useless during these periods as well.
Also.. there's night and weather. You can't always freely image the surface just because you have a camera pointed in that direction.
These are just a small number of reasons that whole-earth real-time imaging is seriously difficult.
If you're looking for a ship you're going to have much more success with a synthetic aperture radar satellite. They work through clouds and at night, and the bright reflection of a ship's flat steel plates is fairly easy to spot against the background clutter of the sea.
Unfortunately they generally cost hundreds of millions of dollars and there's only a handful of them in operation.
If a western government actually wanted to look for this ship (while it was still floating, anyway), they'd almost certainly find it. There's whole divisions of the air force and navy trained to do exactly that. The cost of the search would be pretty much unjustifiable though.
What? You're off by several orders of magnitude. The surface area of the earth is only 196 million square miles. Still very big, but nowhere near 510 trillion square miles.
The Earth's diameter is ~13000 km. Surface area is therefore 4 * pi * r^2 = 4 * pi * ((13000/2)^2) = 500 million square kilometres (which is, as you say, about 200 million square miles).
I suspect the parent is both confusing a million with a trillion and also miles with kilometres.
Neither. It's just such a habit to type miles. I meant 510 trillion square _meters_, which google and wolfram alpha tell me is correct.
In any case.. the reason I chose that is because that's probably close to a reasonable maximum single pixel resolution for tracking imagery. I wanted the scope of the problem to be obvious by choice of units; unfortunately, I screwed that part up. :(
> There are 510 trillion square miles of surface area on the planet.
I understand it's a big job, but that's why big governments have billion dollar budgets and toys.
Also remember we have no need to take photos of the entire surface, only the Atlantic (and even then, only the North Atlantic right now)
>You could, conceivably, completely miss the object in your imaging passes
I feel quite confident when images are taken their exact co-ordinates are known, so it can be quickly determined if you've "missed" a patch or if you have them all.
>* or the satellite you have tasked for a particular ground track has an error in it's imaging sensor or downlink equipment*
I feel quite certain they've tested these things extensively, and they're not going find some previously unknown bug while looking for a ship in the ocean. They work properly.
> * You might also have to move the satellites around occasionally making imaging useless during these periods as well.*
I thought most satellites were in orbits that make it possible to image almost the entire surface without moving them.
> Also.. there's night and weather
I didn't say it was going to be easy.
> whole-earth real-time imaging is seriously difficult
I'm not for one second proposing whole-earth real-time imaging.
> I understand it's a big job, but that's why big governments have billion dollar budgets and toys. Also remember we have no need to take photos of the entire surface, only the Atlantic (and even then, only the North Atlantic right now)
Yes.. but spending a billion dollars to save a few million is kind of silly, isn't it?
> feel quite confident when images are taken their exact co-ordinates are known, so it can be quickly determined if you've "missed" a patch or if you have them all.
Knowing you're missing data is one thing, but if you're _looking_ for a _moving_ object it can really set you back. You also then have to wait for that satellite, or another one on the same ground track to make the next pass. Most earth imaging satellites have a 90 minute orbital period. Even then, the earth is spinning, so you can't get back to the _exact_ spot very easily (if at all). Still confident this is easy?
> I feel quite certain they've tested these things extensively, and they're not going find some previously unknown bug while looking for a ship in the ocean. They work properly.
You can't image from geosynchronous orbit. I mean, you can, but it's pointless. You need a polar orbit. These orbits aren't stable. You need to adjust them (seriously, sign up for the GPS update list and see how often they have to be adjusted and moved).
Also, "they work properly." Clearly you're not an engineer. Things work properly until they don't. Which could be because of component failure, debris strike or you know, plain ole solar flares. These objects are in _space_. It sort of ups the bar.
> thought most satellites were in orbits that make it possible to image almost the entire surface without moving them.
As I said before, these orbits aren't perfectly stable. You need to boost and adjust and make movements. You may also want to put a new satellite in a slot where a previous satellite (with lessor technology) was. This all requires an insane amount of coordination and effort. Or, an insanely huge cluster.
> I didn't say it was going to be easy.
You made it sound as if it was a foregone conclusion. My effort was to point out that it is in no way that simple. It's going to be hard, it's going to cost a lot, you're going to have to throw people and money and equipment at it _constantly_. Is this justifiable for looking for missing objects? Probably not.
> I'm not for one second proposing whole-earth real-time imaging.
Then good luck finding those _moving_ objects. Also, I'd like to know what orbit takes a satellite only over the Atlantic Ocean. Yes, there are orbits that can "park" over an area, but those orbits are useless for the type of imaging you're suggesting, so you have to deal with the whole-earth problem anyways.
Or use crowdsourced anomaly classification like http://www.tomnod.com/ Though you get more interest in relief, search and rescue cases, not abandoned ships.
Yes, if it's still afloat, you can find it, hire a salvage firm with to ocean-going tugs, and tow it to a shipyard for overhaul.
Or you could buy a used cruise ship. Lots of smaller ones are available, because everybody seems to want the mega-huge ones now.[1] There are some nice mega-yacht possibilities available for $1m - $3m.
Of course, now you have to find a place to park it and pay about 20 people to run it.
I think that's actually the activation energy. Entropy is a measure of disorder - it's a count of the number of different ways something can be arranged.
Battleship São Paulo was a ship that... sort of fought on WW1 (it started the war as active, but the British complained it had poor fire control, the ship was sent to US for refit, but the refitting ended after the war ended). And fought on WW2 (during WW2 the ship had problems with mobility, having a top speed of only 10km/h, that was nowhere close of the original design speed, so it was decided to use it as stationary defensive platform in Brazil's northeast, where a couple of U boats were attacking transport ships).
In 1951 it was sold to a british scrap company, the tug line broke mid-transport and the ship was lost very hard (as in: people have no idea where to look for it, they don't even know the initial direction that the ship went after the tow line broke).
Wouldn't that ship be bigger than the resolution of modern satellites photographing earth? So in conclusion, not all parts of the world are being monitored from space, or at least nobody wants to admit to it?
You're partially right. The whole of the Earth isn't constantly monitored by the kind of satellites that could resolve this ship. However a lot of the high resolution satellites are in polar or nearly polar orbits so one satellite will see the whole Earth in a couple orbits. There's just not a need to collect and process all that information unless there's some reason to be looking at that chunk of land or sea. Generally they'd be focused on more pressing issues like monitoring other countries military bases instead of trying to find a mostly harmless ship in the North Atlantic.
If there was some reason that this ship was an actual threat to countries like the US or Russia who have the large high resolution satellite networks in place it probably would have been found pretty quickly. There just wasn't a reason for the effort to be expended to look for it, the ship was old and being scrapped and wasn't full of anything particularly dangerous to worry any of the countries that could find it.
Finding things in the sea is basically a question of radar reflectivity and the search area. A ship in the north Atlantic? Its big flat steel sides reflect lots of radar signals, and the search area, while large, is (compared to the pacific and indian oceans) rather small. I don't doubt that anyone looking for this ship would find it fairly quickly.
The problems with MH370 were twofold. One - initially nobody actually knew where it was. The search area was HUGE, and for the first few days there was much less information about the aircraft location. The eventual search area was selected based on quite detailed analysis of the satellite pings the aircraft sent. This took time. It took 9 days for the search to even start in the southern Indian Ocean. Even once they'd figured out roughly where it had gone down, the search area was still astronomically big. Two - aircraft wreckage isn't nearly as reflective to radar as a ship. An aluminium panel floating flat in the ocean will have a very similar reflection profile to the surrounding water.
I think you need a fourth option. Large countries definitely have a technical advantage, but the military still has to obey the laws of physics. Large budgets and no legal restrictions probably put military technology a generation or two ahead of comparable civilian technology - it's better, but it's not magic.
Obviously, you'd need quite some budget to pay an analytics team to find a plane out in the ocean. You can't just conjure the money out of thin air.
And if you go to your superiors and ask them for the money and have to admit it will disclose a lot of your capabilities to foreign powers, you'll likely simply get a resounding "NO". After all, it was never the question of rescuing living people with MH370.
Did you notice how the US kept sat images and phone recordings extremely close to their chest in the case of MH17? I am pretty sure they have a lot more intelligence on that thing than they are willing to admit - they not having constant surveillance over a battle field in Europe would be extremely negligent.
Debris fields are a harder ask distinguishing the debris from MH370 from just the normal trash of the ocean. The ship has the benefit of being a large defined whole and we have a lot of info on other ships' and their location (though the tracking of ships is far from perfect it relies on them keeping their beacon on). It strikes me as a much harder problem to find MH370 because in order to resolve the debris they'd have to take very high res photos so it'd cover a very small area in one shot.
So 2 & 3? They probably used some satellite imagery to look for large chunks but the effort to do the small survey was beyond what they were willing to expend without a better idea of where to search.
It is, but surveillance satellites do not and cannot image the entire earth regularly. They take pictures of comparatively small targeted areas on demand.
Zoom into the ocean with Google Maps/Earth. You'll see that away from land, the resolution plummets. Too much water surface, not enough reason for high detail.
Looks like a very interesting web site, well worth a look around. Bookmarked. Those interested in ghost ships will have heard of the Mary Celeste, but what about the apocryphal Ourang Medan? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ourang_Medan
I've been there, but visited mostly different parts of the site, and didn't find where the nuclear missiles were stored. It occupies several square kilometres.
The closest railway station is at the nearby village, also called Vogelsang. I had to press a bell to stop the train to get off, and put my hand out to stop it to get back on.
I'm highly ignorant about sea travel, but I wonder why the towing vessel didn't hook back up to the ship when the line broke. Maybe someone here can explain.
I trained as a navigator in the merchant navy for two years and i find it hard to believe that such a light ship (displacement ~4500 only) could be lost due to a broken tow line (considering it had a full fledged crew onboard who could have easily made fast another one). what a sad loss. would have loved to have that moored on my marina
It looks like smoke is coming from the funnel on one of those photos? Did people board it while it was adrift and start up a boiler (presumably there was fuel still on board?)
As far as I can tell from the article, no one has photographed it after it went adrift, so those pictures must have been taken when it was being actively used.
Yes: This is the sort of random cool article I visit HN to see. I honestly couldnt give a shit about so called startup culture and the latest trendy javascript library or whatever. I am not web-app developer. I (like many other HN visitors it seems judging on the comments) am just interested in tech/science/computers/interesting miscellanea, and HN is a great quickly updating source of this sort of thing. Also I really appreciate the sites magnificent design.
Also stuff gets on the main page here via upvoting, so obviously enough HN viewers liked this particular article.
Agree. Startup and Silicon Valley culture pieces as well as anything relating to web development are easily the least interesting pieces on HN in my view.
Just in case you haven't seen yet, this is what the guidelines say about "good" vs "bad" posts:
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
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