BROYE-LES-PESMES,
France - A French space-surveillance radar has detected 20-30 satellites in low
Earth orbit that do not figure in the U.S. Defense Department's published
catalogue, a discovery that French officials say they will use to pressure U.S.
authorities to stop publishing the whereabouts of French reconnaissance and
military communications satellites.
After 16
months of operations of their Graves radar system, which can locate satellites
in orbits up to 1,000 kilometers in altitude and even higher in certain cases,
the French Defense Ministry says it has gathered just about enough information
to negotiate an agreement with the United States.
The U.S.
Defense Department's Space Surveillance Network is the world's gold standard
for cataloguing satellites and debris in both low Earth orbit and the higher
geostationary orbit at 36,000 kilometers in altitude, where telecommunications
satellites operate.
Data from
the U.S. network of ground-based sensors is regularly published and used
worldwide by those tracking satellite and space-debris trajectories. The
published U.S. information excludes sensitive U.S. defense satellites, but
regularly publishes data on the orbits of other nations' military hardware.
In a series
of presentations here at the site of the French Graves radar facility, French
defense officials said they are gathering data on classified satellites in low
Earth orbit as part of a future European space-surveillance program that
European Space Agency governments will be asked to approve in 2008. This
program, with a cost of some 300 million euros ($405 million), would feature
higher-performance radars to track space debris in low orbit and in
geostationary orbit.
This new
space surveillance program may or may not be approved by European governments.
But the Graves radar, and a complementary system operated by the German
government, together already are enough to pinpoint the location, size, orbit
and transmissions frequencies of satellites that the United States would prefer
not be broadcast worldwide, French officials said.
"We have
discussed the Graves results with our American colleagues and highlighted the
discrepancies between what we have found and what is published by the U.S.
Space Surveillance Network," said one French defense official responsible for
the Graves operation. "They told us, 'If we have not published it in our
catalogue, then it does not exist.' So I guess we have been tracking objects
that do not exist. I can tell you that some of these non-existent objects have
solar arrays."
Col. Yves Blin,
deputy head of the space division at the French joint defense staff, said
France would wait until it had acquired, with the help of the German radar,
further information about the 20 to 30 secret satellites in question before
beginning serious negotiations with the United States on a common approach for
publishing satellite orbit information.
"Right now
we do not have enough cards in our hand to begin negotiatons," Blin said here
at the Graves radar transmitter site June 7. "We need more time to be sure of
what we are seeing. At that point we can tell our American friends, 'We have
seen some things that you might wish to keep out of the public domain. We will
agree to do this if you agree to stop publishing the location of our sensitive
satellites."
advertisement
