China Building Gigantic Structures In the Desert 412
A user writes "New photos have appeared in Google Maps showing unidentified titanic structures in the middle of the Chinese desert. The first one is an intricate network of what appears to be huge metallic stripes. It's located in Dunhuang, Jiuquan, Gansu, north of the Shule River, which crosses the Tibetan Plateau to the west into the Kumtag Desert. It covers an area approximately one mile long by more than 3,000 feet wide. The tracks are perfectly executed, and they seem to be designed to be seen from orbit."
Re:These areas are for military (Score:5, Informative)
Because all of his links go to ads?
Possibly Salt Evaporation (Score:5, Informative)
One in Israel [g.co]
California [g.co]
Re:These areas are for military (Score:5, Informative)
Worse, his links go to an advertisement based link shortener that won't let you see the content until you sign up. Riiiiight.
Re:These areas are for military (Score:5, Informative)
Not to mention it's completely ripped off from a reddit post here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mat1s/there_appears_to_be_a_monumental_militaryscience/
Re:Possible use... (Score:2, Informative)
Fractal antennas are implemented in cell phones because they can be used to receive multiple frequencies with one antenna, but no radio wavelength would require an antenna that big. Good observation though.
Re:Possibly Salt Evaporation (Score:4, Informative)
Not sure... but wouldn't it require not being in the desert for there to be water to evapourate to form the lines?
Not necessarily. Chinese have been producing salt from underground brine deposits for millenia. They even invented the Percussive Drilling Rig for this purpose, reaching depths that the rest of the world would not match until modern times.
Re:Possible use... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, from what I've read it's near a Chinese missile testing site, and it a couple o fthese do look like a fake city grid done up in a hurry to give surface-to-surface missiles something to shoot at.
Re:Are they simulating a city? roads? Testing opti (Score:3, Informative)
You're getting close. Hard to say for certain, though, whether they're targets for aerial or orbital sensors. Having worked on similar optical, IR and Radar ISR sensors, these look very familiar to the calibration targets and test ranges we used with those systems. Can't say much more, other than that for scientific sensors used to monitor atmospheric chemistry, we often used very large, flat areas with albedos as white and as spectrally pure as possible... think very large areas of uniform minerals like dry lake beds. On top of those were placed small point targets, and once we even had access to MTF targets built on the ground.
I'm guessing the third one is for radar -- synthetic aperture radar perhaps.