Outer space

Detecting Secret Military Exercises With Micro Satellites, a How-To


Detecting an adversary’s unscheduled naval exercise used to require a massive operation perhaps involving multiple agencies. In March 2017, a small team of analysts with a firm called 3GIMBALS, working with U.S. Southern Command, used imagery from a constellation of inexpensive microsatellites to pick up an unscheduled military exercise in Venezuela that had taken place a year prior. How they did it says a lot about the future of intelligence collection from space, where the U.S. has a rapidly shrinking advantage.

The game-changer wasn’t the algorithm; it was the availability of cheap, daily satellite imagery — in this case, from a startup called Planet Labs. [Full disclosure: Defense One has an agreement to get limited free imagery from Planet.] With a constellation of 149 microsatellites, Planet can cover a lot more territory than any single high-end satellite, so almost anywhere in the world you look, Planet can find a recent picture of it. With new imagery coming in every day, you can automate a search for changes at various locations...