For tracking of military ships it's much better to use radar imaging satellites (e.g. see [0]). They can cover a larger area, see ships really well, and almost not affected by weather.
replyI will not be surprised if China has a constellation of such satellites to track US carriers and it's why Pentagon keeps them relatively far from Iran, since it's likely that China confidentially shares targeting information with them.
[0]: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...
China has Huanjing [0], which is officially for "environmental monitoring", but almost certainly has enough resolution to track large ships (at least the later versions, apparently the early versions had poor resolution)
replyAnd even if they didn't, Russia have Kondor, [1] which is explicitly military, and we know they have been sharing data with Iran.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanjing_(satellite) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondor_(satellite)
Strava tracks can also be spoofed and you have no
guarantee for them to appear on a schedule either.
I just find this to be on the sensationalist side of "data" journalism lacking any sort of contextualization or threat level assessment.
Unless there was evidence of some more sensitive locations that have not been published along this story, it looks like some serious unserious case of journalism to me.
replyClouds only affect a narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Plenty of satellite constellations use synthetic aperture radar, for example, which can see ships regardless of cloud cover. There are gaps in revisit rates, especially over the ocean, but even that has come way down.
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