Local congresswoman Nancy Mace said: “How in the hell do you lose an F-35? How is there not a tracking device and we’re asking the public to what, find a jet and turn it in?”
It's a stealth fighter! Adding a tracking beacon would be self-defeating: if it's made intentionally easy for the USMC to find, that can be used by enemies.
US military asks for help to find missing F-35 fighter jet after ‘mishap’ sees pilot eject:
@ncweaver@cstross Besides, the ADS-B transponder provides good ground truth for the ML model used by your stealth-detecting radars…
But yes, you're right; these planes do have transponders for non-wartime use.
@ncweaver@cstross You do that by passively listening to surveillance radar returns, from other folks’ radar units. No need to be conspicuous by transmitting…
@ncweaver@SteveBellovin I have heard rumors of using pulsars and other radio astronometric signals as sources for passive radar ... night have been a leg-pull but isn't obviously impossible?
@cstross@ncweaver Hmm—I wonder what antenna size is needed. (The coolest use I ever heard of that combines radio waves and astronomical phenomena is meteor burst communication: bouncing a radio signal off the ionization trail left by a meteoroid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_burst_communications)
@cstross@ncweaver@SteveBellovin A bunch of nice open-source SDR projects have had their passive radar (Using Terrestrial TV, Radio, and Cell Phone Towers) firmware heavily ITAR-hammered. Not sure you'd need extraterrestrial illumination sources when the local ones are so ubiquitous.
@DismalManorGang@dshan@cstross@TidalFlats It's a structural problem with large democracries: even if something is in the country's best interest, you still need to spread the jobs and increase the inefficiency if you want enough politicians to vote. It's been hurting NASA for decades.
Edit: I should add that the above pained me to say because I'm very much not a #Libertarian, but this particular stopped clock is right twice in a blue moon.
@ovid@DismalManorGang@dshan@TidalFlats it's a structural problem all right—one arising from historic tolerance of widespread endemic corruption. It's not inevitable.
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