To be able to be seen from ordinary aircraft is one thing. To be seen from satellites adds a bit more that just drama.
Why? Satellites can spot a newspaper lying on the ground these days. I’ve never heard of one that could read the print, but I’m sure it’s not far off.
Not unless it’s very big print. Such a thing would be optically impossible (there have been several SDMB threads about it).
If you go in to maximum zoom, I’m pretty sure it’s white paint or simalir markings.
at 40.450858,93.739581 you can see how the paint follows the contour of the hill. A little to the left there’s a wormlike structure sticking out of the ground. Mongolian Death worm?
It seems to be an artefact of the photography. The images are taken in rectangular sections. Adjacent rectangles may be photographed at different times of day, under different weather, different light conditions, etc, and thus can appear to be totally different colours.
Missile testing, at least the grid ones. For sophisticated guide missiles, the grid patterns resemble a city layout and can be used to testing.
The one with concentric circle looks very much like the solar plant built in Spain.
This one seems to have had a mudflow or something like that over it. And see the light colored rectangle to the west of the ‘grid’? According to the Google Earth time slider, that was created sometime between May and November 2005.
Incidentally, can anyone tell me how to copy coordinates of what you are looking at out of Google Earth? I can’t seem to figure it out.
Perhaps they’re just fucking with Google Maps and their millions of users. Or they could be expansive movie sets. Hehehe.
Nope - if this were a one-off sat image, maybe, but if you bring up those coordinates in Google Earth (40.452107,93.742118), and use their “time machine” function, you can see that the pattern stays within the same dimensions, and with the same markings (accounting for weathering) over several years. Here’s a shot from April 2005 showing this mid-construction: http://imm.io/bEBW. ETA: Here’s the same spot from Nov 2010: http://imm.io/bECd.
I just saw them on Google Maps and they look really surreal and out of place. A bit like the Bifrost. If they’re for classified purposes, China wouldn’t let Google be taking pictures of them, would they? They’re not even taking any measures to conceal them.
This is an interesting view Crown Prince - the feint lines, whilst possibly tracks from vehicles used in the construction, remind me of cabling going back to whatever structure is there on the left. I would have thought that if they were vehicle tracks, there would be more of them and that they would be more irregularly distributed.
Odd.
There may be a more elegant way to do it, but here’s my method - in Google Earth, I click the “Add Placemark” push-pin icon in the toolbar. Drag the pushpin to the spot you want coordinates for, then copy/paste the Latitude and Longtitude from the placemark properties window. If you’re plugging them back into another mapping tool, separate them with a comma.
If you dig into this on Google Earth, you’ll see even more tracks on the southern edge of this area - some of which are still quite visible in the Nov 2010 shot, 5 years after they were made. While this is a desert and may not get a lot of rain, you’d think that wind erosion would have erased them by now.
Sure - I’ve seen flooded clay pits where the water was absurdly blue due to minerals (or possibly colloids), but a cyan runway is more likely to be an image adjustment artefact - they might have tweaked the tiles to normalise the earth tones and contrast, for example.
I can’t check from here, but if their ‘tails’ are all pointing in a general downhill direction, then it sounds like they are probably craters, and the tails are eroded gullies leading out of them.
I tell you what’s even more spooky: the hilarious alteration between the Herald Sun’s article from Australia, and the one syndicated from News Corp Australian Papers by the Fox website:
ETA: note they ‘cleaned up’ WTF, but left all the typos in.
If they’re using an automatic adjustment, you’d expect the same effect to show up elsewhere, and if this was, for some odd reason, done by hand, it seems a bit strange that anyone would leave it like that. Plus there’s another ‘runway’ just a little to the west and with no photo edge lines in between, which appears a very deep shade of blue. It looks to me like it’s a reflective surface, reflecting sky. Same goes for the roofs of the buildings nearby- which are deep blue in that photo.
You’re right. Once I zoomed in they do look like painted lines. Very strange.
More discussion here from 2009. If you click the thumbnails it takes you to the current imagery - note how some of them have been bombed out even more since the thumbnails were saved. Especially the “runway” and blue-roofed buildings (fifth and sixth thumbnails down the page).
I don’t know why these pictures are suddenly all over the internet - they were being discussed as long ago as 2006!
Just thought I’d mention the ghost cities being built in China: