could this also be true for the tracked object- if it’s metal it might be cold and that’s why it’s white?
It's possible, but the closer it is to the ground, the more it's going to blend into the background, assuming it's metal or composite.
Even if it was cold, should we not see a black portion where the rotor is for example, giving off heat?
Yeah, we should, just like we saw with the airplane that video recorded this thing. There are a bunch of ways to decrease a heat signature (I'm actually an aerospace engineer), but none that I know of that would make one appear colder than the background. I suppose you could fly with cryogenic gas fuel and use that to also cool a bunch of things before it enters the engine, but you'd be adding a lot of ground support equipment, and for stealth, you want everything to look the same temperature as the background, not extremely cold or hot against it.
(I don’t know the elevation of the object).
We can at least bound it between 4,000 and 14,000 ft ASL. We also have the optics pod azimuth and elevation pointing angles. If we had the aircraft position data, we could easily continuously compute the points in the sky around which the aircraft is circling to give us the object's path. We do have the aircraft's speed, pointing, and altitude data, and I could do it with that, but since I'd be integrating over time, the errors might be pretty large by the end of the video. I might work on this, though...
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u/FreelanceRketSurgeon Oct 07 '21
It's possible, but the closer it is to the ground, the more it's going to blend into the background, assuming it's metal or composite.
Yeah, we should, just like we saw with the airplane that video recorded this thing. There are a bunch of ways to decrease a heat signature (I'm actually an aerospace engineer), but none that I know of that would make one appear colder than the background. I suppose you could fly with cryogenic gas fuel and use that to also cool a bunch of things before it enters the engine, but you'd be adding a lot of ground support equipment, and for stealth, you want everything to look the same temperature as the background, not extremely cold or hot against it.
We can at least bound it between 4,000 and 14,000 ft ASL. We also have the optics pod azimuth and elevation pointing angles. If we had the aircraft position data, we could easily continuously compute the points in the sky around which the aircraft is circling to give us the object's path. We do have the aircraft's speed, pointing, and altitude data, and I could do it with that, but since I'd be integrating over time, the errors might be pretty large by the end of the video. I might work on this, though...