Defense: Unexpected Electronic Side Effects EscalateAir
January 2, 2023: Commercial photo satellites have been providing the public with regularly updated photos since 2005 when Google Earth was introduced. This free service demonstrated the usefulness of commercial satellite photos but also had some unwanted side effects. The most common problem was the use of Google Earth by criminals and terrorists. Now the problem of unwanted side effects has shown up with a new generation of commercial satellite services that use radar to provide a more abstract but more detailed image of what is on the ground. The two Sentinel radar satellites provide updated data on what is down there about once every 36 hours. Its growing number of users can filter the data in many ways to obtain a result that suits their needs which includes resource (crops, forests) monitoring and tracking forest fires and other natural disasters like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the like. Sentinel also became popular with users who just wanted to see all that the system could do. That’s when it was discovered that Sentinel could, using the right filters, detect Patriot air defense system radars night or day and in any weather. In hindsight, this sort of side effect was to be expected because this sort of thing has happened before with ground or aircraft based electronic transmitters.
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