Comment by peterfirefly
12 hours ago
Do you think a carrier can very far in the couple of hours it takes for a satellite to orbit around the Earth?
12 hours ago
Do you think a carrier can very far in the couple of hours it takes for a satellite to orbit around the Earth?
A carrier can likely get far enough to generate a miss. Missiles and drones have very limited sensors so in order to hit anything another platform has to cue them with a fairly precise target location. In other words, an adversary like China would need to have enough satellites, submarines, and/or patrol aircraft to maintain a continuous target track long enough to make a decision, launch the weapons, and have them fly out to the target. Current thinking is that China could probably do this inside the first island chain but would struggle to put the pieces together further out in the open Pacific Ocean.
If the carrier is aware of the overflight (and I assume the USN isn't run by complete idiots), it can adjust course after the overflight. And at 30 knots, can be 100s of miles away from its initial location when the satellite returns.
Now satellite constellations make it harder, since their numbers limit this strategy. But currently, none of the know systems utilize SAR like the LEO satellites, so they wouldn't function well in bad weather. They'd have to rely on optics which can be severely degraded.
A typical LEO optical satellite has maybe a 60km swath at high resolution. And it isn't just a couple of hours - an orbit doesn't go over the same spot every two hours. You only may get 1-2 passes a day with a given type of constellation.
China would be using their Yaogan-41 (geostationary) to try to track, which might work, in good weather, during daytime, IF the carrier group was south of Japan (it's equatorial). Carriers deliberately transit through weather, strike groups disperse broadly and use decoy behavior in wartime, and a geostationary optical satellite won't know which blip is the carrier and which is a support ship 50km away.
Every night, you lose the carrier group and have to find it again in the morning, if you can. Usually you can't, even with China's layered approach using optical, SAR, ELINT, and OTH radar.
My understanding is to track something like a carrier the satellite has to be in low earth orbit. Those circle the earth about every two hours. So it is not so much the carrier outruns the satellite; it is the satellite outruns the carrier.
https://eos.com/blog/types-of-satellites/