Amateur Astronomer Spots US Spy Satellite

The latest US spy satellite sent into orbit on June 11th has already been spotted in space, undoing its purported secrecy. Sky News reported that an amateur astronomer in Australia, Paul Camilleri, made the find with help from Marco Langbroek's SatTrackCam blog.

The Leiden-based Langbroek wrote that "the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) launched a classified payload from Cape Canaveral under the launch designation NROL-37. It was a launch into geosynchronous orbit using a Delta IV-Heavy rocket."

According to Langbroek, the NROL-37 was widely rumored to be Mentor 7, the newest in a class of surveillance satellites that the NRO has been sending into space since 1995. Also known as Advanced Orion satellites, they gather signals intelligence (SIGINT) from orbit-that is, they eavesdrop on radio communications.

The exact missions and capabilities of such satellites remain classified. The United Launch Alliance (ULA) provided merely a brief description of the NROL-37's purpose as "in support of national defense."

The NROL-37 was originally scheduled for launch on Thursday (June 9th), but poor weather conditions delayed the liftoff by two days. The launch on Saturday sent the satellite into space aboard the largest rocket currently in operation, the Delta IV-Heavy (Delta 9250H).

Minutes after the rocket's blastoff from Cape Canaveral, the live video feed of the launch was cut, presumably to obscure the payload's trajectory. Only a few days later (June 14 UTC), Camilleri detected the satellite's location near longitude 104E, somewhere above the Strait of Malacca, the body of water between the Malaysian Peninsula and Sumatra, Indonesia.

A blog update by Langbroek on Camilleri's continued observations said that the spy satellite had stopped drifting and remained "geosynchronous in a stable, 7.5 degree inclined position at longitude 102.6 E."

In its analysis of the situation, military affairs blog StrategyPage declared, "The U.S. intelligence community is not happy with the increasing speed with which amateur sky watchers find, and often correctly identify, newly launched intelligence gathering satellites."