According to a report in New Scientist, the British science journal, United States spy satellites are not in the orbits the Pentagon says they are.
The 1975 UN Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space requires nations to maintain a registry of objects they launch, and to provide the UN with copies. But "The U.S. is not in compliance," space analyst Jonathan McDowell told the magazine. "The 1989 launch of military satellite 1989-72A was never registered with the UN."
According to McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, several discrepancies have been found in the UN data. "Suspicious mistakes date back as early as the 1970s," McDowell told New Scientist.
And the discrepancies have become worse recently: correct orbits are listed for only two of the ten classified satellites the U.S. launched in 1999 and 2000, he said. McDowell said three listed orbits are not those the satellites finally slotted into, while another four are wrong for other reasons, such as listing the orbit of another object launched at the same time. The remaining discrepancy is simply a typographical error.
The UN Office for Outer Space Affairs has confirmed that the Pentagon's data is incorrect, but says it can't do anything about it. A spokesman for U.S. Space Command, which tracks nearly 9000 orbiting objects from its base deep inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, said the U.S. "is in full compliance with the convention". According to the treaty, each nation can determine "the content of each registry and the conditions under which it is maintained," he told New Scientist. He offered no comment on the orbital discrepancies.
Unfortunately, the UN registry relies on a treaty that allows long delays in providing data, and does not require nations to give final orbits. "In fact, they mostly provide only the initial orbit," said Petr Lala, research chief for the UN office, which is aware of McDowell's findings.
The UN's outer space convention was intended to identify the owners of all satellites, in case any posed hazards or caused damage. Governments want to know the orbits of other objects so they can be sure no one is trying to intercept their own satellites, said Charles Vick of the Federation of American Scientists in Washington D.C.
Although U.S. Space Command said its actions fall within the letter of the treaty, McDowell said: "It's certainly violating the spirit of an international commitment."
Vick suspects that the Pentagon hopes to make it harder to evade surveillance from space by concealing the orbits of its spy satellites--but Russia and China have their own tracking systems, and amateur astronomers post orbits on the Web.
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