A French M51 SLBM test with a 6000 km range on June 12

click image to enlarge

On the morning of June 12, 2020, the French Navy test launched an unarmed M51 SLBM from the Triomphant-class submarine Le Téméraire.

The launch was from a spot near the French coast just south of Audierne Bay in Bretagne, not far from the French Naval port of Brest, according to a French Government bulletin. Navigational Warnings place it around 47^o.65 N, 4^o.15 W. The launch direction was towards the Caribean, with impact in the Atlantic Ocean near 24^o.4 N, 66^o.1 W according to the same Navigational Warnings.

The locations of the hazard areas from these Navigational Warnings point to a 6000 km flight trajectory (see figures above and below):


HYDROLANT 1882/20

EASTERN NORTH ATLANTIC.
CELTIC SEA.
BAY OF BISCAY.
FRANCE.
DNC 08.
1. MISSILE OPERATIONS 0200Z TO 1100Z DAILY
11 JUN THRU 11 JUL IN AREAS BOUND BY:
A. 47-12N 010-25W, 47-49N 004-31W,
47-39N 004-01W, 47-24N 004-11W,
46-44N 010-17W.
B. 46-17N 019-54W, 46-50N 017-09W,
45-07N 016-29W, 44-35N 019-01W.
2. CANCEL THIS MSG 111200Z JUL 20.//

Authority: NAVAREA II 167/20 042002Z JUN 20.

Date: 060713Z JUN 20
Cancel: 11120000 Jul 20


 
NAVAREA IV 485/20

NORTH ATLANTIC.
1. MISSILE OPERATIONS 0200Z TO 1100Z DAILY
11 JUN THRU 11 JUL:
A. IN AREA BOUND BY
39-37N 040-14W, 40-40N 037-48W,
39-41N 037-07W, 38-39N 039-31W.
B. IN AREA WITHIN 92 MILES OF 24-24N 066-06W.
2. CANCEL THIS MSG 111200Z JUL 20.//

Authority: AVURNAV BREST 070808Z JUN 20.

Date: 070851Z JUN 20
Cancel: 11120000 Jul 20


I have plotted the Navigational Warnings on the map below. The line shown is a simple STK-modelled ballistic trajectory, which fits these area's well. Assuming a 1200 km apogee, the flight-time should have been around 23 minutes.

Click map to enlarge

The M51 is  the newest French SLBM. It is in service since mid-2010. It has three stages and can carry up to 10 RV's. It's maximum range is said to be near 11 000 km, i.e. comparable to the Trident-II SLBM of the US Navy and Royal British Navy. This is the 5th succesful test of an M51 SLBM (a 6th test attempt in May 2013 ended in failure).

A nice summary of what is known from public sources about this test is provided in this article by Tyler Rogoway on The Drive.


Note added
For those interested in these issues: last year, I did an in-depth analysis of several Trident-II SLBM test launches, including one that was serendipitously photographed by an astrophotographer from the Canary Island. The latter observation allowed to estimate the apogee altitude of that test.

[UPDATED] Where to hide your nuclear missile submarine? (but be quick)

(Updated 20 Dec 2017 23:25 UT with a new plot that includes DSP)

Say, you are the leader of a nefarious country that is in posession of submarines equiped with long range nuclear missiles. You want to launch a stealth missile attack codenamed "Operation Orange Squeeze" on a northern hemisphere Super Power.

Where would you direct your submarine, and where would you best fire you missiles, from the perspective of an as-late-as-possible space-based detection of your missile launches?

The answer came to me today when, after a question by someone (in the context of a war crime investigation), I looked into the current global coverage of the Space Based Infra Red System (SBIRS), the US system of Early Warning satellites that looks for missile launches:

click map to enlarge

The red areas in the map above have an almost continuous coverage by SBIRS satellites (and often by multiple SBIRS satellites at the same time). The dark blue and black areas in the map by contrast have only a few minutes of SBIRS coverage each day, or even none at all.

As you can see, there is a clear gap in coverage in the southeastern Pacific, with lowest coverage in the area near the Galapagos islands. That is where I would park my nuclear missile submarine.

You might have to be quick to pull off your nefarious plan though. A new SBIRS satellite, the fourth satellite in the geostationary component, will launch in January. It wouldn't surprise me if it stops the gap, once operational.

Of course, this map is in fact somewhat deceptive anyway. It only shows the coverage by SBIRS. But there is also the legacy early warning satellite system called DSP (Defense Support System), which still has active satellites, and which is not taken into account here [UPDATE: but see the plot at the end of this post!]. It is less sensitive than SBIRS, but likely will detect your ICBM SLBM launch.

Back to SBIRS. SBIRS is made up of two components, each currently consisting of three satellites (so six in total): three geosynchronous SBIRS-GEO satellites at geostationary altitude, and three SBIRS-HEO satellites (TRUMPET-FO SIGINT satellites with a piggy-back SBIRS package) in 64-degree inclined Highly Elliptical Orbits with two revolutions a day.

click map to enlarge

The map above shows the coverage of the three geosynchronous SBIRS satellites (a fourth will be launched in January). Eurasia, Africa and the western Pacific Ocean has a continuous coverage by these satellites, with central Asia, Pakistan and India (the latter two known nuclear powers) particularly well covered.

The SBIRS-HEO coverage is more variable and depends on the date and time of day, but the system is designed such that at least one of the HEO satellites will have much of the Northern hemisphere in view at any time. Here are a few examples, for various times of the day: note how coverage of the Northern hemisphere is near-continuous (the HEO component also particularly covers the Arctic region well, which is at the edge of the GEO component's coverage).

click maps to enlarge

A SBIRS satellite typically has two modes: there is the scanning mode, which scans the whole visible hemisphere of the earth (as seen from the satellite) for infra-red heat signatures in less than 10 seconds. And there is the staring mode, a more sensitive sensor which can be used to observe a specific region or just detected infra-red event.

In the case of a missile launch, the sensors pick up the heat signal of the missile engine. Because of the large degree of worldwide coverage which the system now provides, an undetected stealth launch of a nuclear missile has become almost impossible.

SBIRS is probably an important source of  Early Warning capacity and information on the recent North Korean missile tests.


UPDATE 20 Dec 2017  23:25 UT:

I now also included the four DSP satellites that are still operational according to the database of the Union of Concerned Scientists. That leads to the following map:

click map to enlarge

As you can see, the gap has become smaller, but a gap is still there. Red October might be lurking in front of the South American west coast.

[UPDATED 2x] Visualizing the trajectory of the September 10 Trident missile test in the Atlantic

The past days I have covered the story about German astrophotographer Jan Hattenbach's September 10 strange photographic observations from La Palma on this blog. Along with Jonathan McDowell I quickly suspected this was a  missile test launched from a submarine in the Atlantic. This was later confirmed: Lockheed-Martin and the US Navy announced that it was a test with a Trident II D5 SLBM launched from a submerged Ohio-class submarine.

More information next emerged that contained some clues to the launch trajectory. Now Cees Bassa has done an extensive analysis, modelling a trajectory. The details can be found here on the Seesat-L mailing list. He finds a launch location near 28 N, 68 W, more to the west than I initially thought.

I used Cees' results on the launch location and STK to fit a ballistic trajectory through Cees' launch location and the probable target area discussed earlier. The trajectory (visualized below) fits well with the altitudes and azimuths as photographically observed by Jan Hattenbach from La Palma (see astrometry in the appendix to my post here).

click maps to enlarge

The trajectory STK fits allows to say something about altitudes and flight-times. The launch occurred near 21:10:40 UT. After a 36 minute flight over a distance of 8660 km, the target area between St. Helena and the Gabon/Congo coast was reached near 21:47:00 UT. In the top of its ballistic trajectory, the missile reached an altitude of 1800 1900 km.

(note added 27 Sep 2013, 13:00 UT : Cees Bassa has since released the detailed data of his ballistic curve fitting: he has the apogee somewhat lower, at 1650 km, and a flight time between 21:10:00 UT and 21:44:45 UT, one minute faster. Please note that the diagrams below are based on the STK derived trajectory I cobbled together, not Cees' data.

Update 28 sep 13:00 UT: Cees' trajectory does not have the impact point in the published exclusion zone, but somewhat to the East of it. That is the major cause of the discrepancy between the results Cees published, and the ballistic trajectory I present here, which does land squarely in the exclusion zone. With the impact point shifted slightly westwards, the apogee altitude shifts upward if one wants to match the azimuth/elevation data from La Palma.)

click diagrams to enlarge

The two events at 21:17:08 and 21:08:43 UT that I initially misidentified as the 2nd and 3rd stage ignitions, but which are, as Jonathan McDowell pointed out, likely the MIRV bus and MIRV separations, happened at 1130 and 1330 km altitude in the ascending phase, after 6.5 and 8 minutes of flight-time, 1860 respectively 2235 km from the launch location. They are marked in the diagram below:

click diagram to enlarge

(note: for this post I am much indebted to Cees Bassa and his fine analysis. His trajectory reconstruction provided the basis for the diagrams and the timing and altitude information in this post. Cees' own detailed trajectory data can be found here - they slightly differ from what I present above, but see the note elsewhere in the post above.)

BREAKING: the September 10 La Palma event WAS a Trident missile test!

In an earlier post I analyzed a mysterious sighting by German astrophotographer Jan Hattenbach from La Palma on the Canary Islands on September 10.

Based on an analysis of his photographs, I concluded that what he serendipitously captured was most likely an unannounced SLBM (Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile) test in the mid-Atlantic, possibly a US or British Trident test.

News has just broken that the US Navy in cooperation with Lockheed-Martin indeed conducted a test with a modified Trident II D5 Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile in the mid-Atlantic on September 10 (and again on September 12). The Trident D5 missile was launched from a submerged Ohio-class submarine.

(Tip of the Hat to Brian Webb who first brought up the confirmation news today at the SeeSat-L list)

[UPDATED: confirmed!] A clandestine launch in the Mid-Atlantic on Sep 10, captured by a German astrophotographer?

UPDATE 24 Sep 2013 18:00:
It has now been confirmed that this was a US Trident SLBM test launched from an Ohio-class submerged submarine! So I was right!
(note added 25 Sep 2013: a post with more info subsequently come to light and an update on the probable launch trajectory is available here)

click image to enlarge

In the evening of September 10, 2013, German astrophotographer Jan Hattenbach was taking images with an f2.8/24mm lens near the GranTeCa dome, at 2300 meter altitude at the Roque de los Muchachos observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands. His camera was looking due west, out over the Atlantic Ocean, in the direction of Bootes and Virgo. The intention was to create a time lapse movie.

Between 21:16 and 21:20 UT, he captured something unexpected on his images. A strange fuzzy bright object moved over the images, spouting cloudy puffs. Above is a stack of the images: it shows the GranTeCa dome, star trails, a normal satellite (Kosmos 1410)...and the strange cloudy phenomena coming under an oblique angle from the horizon. Below is a short movie made from the images (5 second images with a 2 second interval). Note that it is a time-lapse that speeds up the event: the whole phenomena took about 2.5 minutes in real time:



Jan wrote about his strange observation on his own blog (in German) and posted his story on the AKM forum and on Twitter. Rainer Kresken forwarded it to the SeeSat-L mailinglist, and science writer/journalist Daniel Fischer tweeted to Jonathan McDowell and me whether we could explain the phenomena. Next, Jan was so kind to make his original imagery available to me.

Initially Jan reported that the images were taken near 21:23 UT (Sept 10, 2013). However, it turned out that his camera clock was off by several minutes. The event in reality happened earlier.

Luckily, a "normal" satellite is visible in the image sequence too, briefly flaring, and Cees Bassa and me could identify that satellite as Kosmos 1410 (82-096A). As the orbit of this object is known, astrometry I performed on the trail yielded the correct image times. Jan's camera clock was off by 6m 17s, as it turned out. The phenomena took place between 21:16 and 21:20 UT.

After seeing the images, my first thought was that this could be a fuel vent by a rocket booster in Earth orbit. The time and trajectory did however not match any known object, unclassified or classified.

Another option was a satellite launch. There were however no launches scheduled for this date (and this includes launches of classified objects, which you really cannot keep secret. They are publicly announced as it involves temporary restrictions to airspace down te launch trajectory, and a very visible rocket ascent from Vandenberg or Canaveral).

At that point, I started to suspect that it could perhaps be a hush-hush suborbital ballistic missile launch test, similar to the September 2, 2013, US-Israeli missile test in the Mediterranean. Harvard space historian Jonathan McDowell communicated a similar suspicion, noting that the particular part of the Atlantic has seen Poseidon SLBM tests in the past.

The thing is, that no such test was announced for this date. For example, I have found no NOTAM's  restricting airspace over parts of the Atlantic because of a missile launch. That does not mean it is not a missile test though. It just means that whoever did the test, doesn't want to acknowledge it and preferred no-one to know about it. The September 2, US-Israeli test in the Mediterranean was not announced either (it came to light because it was detected by a Russian Early Warning Radar).

If the event seen from La Palma was indeed a clandestine Medium Range Ballistic Missile test (such as I believe is the case), the primary suspects are the Unites States or Great Britain, who both operate the Trident Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile (SLBM); or the French, who operate the M45 and M51 SLBM.

Several points in the observation fit a SLBM test. The US/British Trident and the French M45/M51 are 3-stage missiles. In the stacked image and movie above, there are two sudden bursts of brightness in the trail, both accompanied by an expanding puffy cloud. I interpret these as the moments of jettison of the 1st stage and ignition of the 2nd stage (note: but see update here); and ejection of the 2nd stage and ignition of the 3rd stage. I have marked these moments, taking place at 21:17:08 and 21:18:43 UT (so with a 1m 35s separation), in below detail of the stacked image. The corresponding astrometric positions of these points are RA 205.061, Dec -3.950, and RA 211.366, Dec -6.153 degrees.

click to enlarge

Below are details from the single still images from those moments:

click image to enlarge

Below is a detail from a single frame just after what I interpret as the 3rd stage ignition, showing a bright fuzzy trail and expanding vapour clouds on both sides:

click image to enlarge

The duration of the event fits what is known of the Trident missile: from launch to 3rd stage ignition takes less than 2 minutes with the Trident. The 2nd stage ignites at about 70 km altitude, the 3rd at about 150km altitude.

A careful look at the stacked image shows that after what I interpret as the 3rd stage ignition, the trajectory clearly starts to deviate from the previous more or less straight line:

click image to enlarge

This is not an effect of lens distortion, as I will show below. It is a real deviation, that fits a missile launch. It shows unequivocally that the phenomena is not a fuel vent by a rocket booster in earth orbit. Such an object (moving in a Great Circle) would move in a straight line when positions are plotted in a Gnomonic projection. I did this for Jan's object: I astrometrically measured points on the trail and converted and plotted the measured RA/DEC in a gnomonic projection system. The same deviation that should not be there if this was an object in Earth orbit is visible in the RA/DEC data:

 

click diagram to enlarge

This makes very clear that Jan's object was not in orbit around the earth, but on a launch/ballistic trajectory. So we can definitely exclude a rocket booster orbiting the earth from a previous launch and venting fuel.

Just to support my previous argument further: here is what the trajectory in RA/DEC looks like for an object in an eccentric GTO orbit observed near perigee over a similar time span as Jan's object. The comparison object is the USA 40 rocket (1989-061D):

Assuming the La Palma event indeed was an unacknowledged Trident SLBM test by the USA or the British, the known specs of the Trident provide a (very) rough indication of where the launch took place.

As mentioned earlier, the 2nd stage of a Trident SLBM ignites at about 70 km altitude, the 3rd at about 150km altitude. As mentioned too above, I interpret two points in the trail to represent these moments. By measuring their astrometric position and calculating the corresponding azimuth and elevation in the sky, we can get a rough indication of distance and direction at these moments. I did this as a (please note) very rough back-of-the-envelope calculation. It suggests the launch took place near latitude 23-25N and a longitude several degrees West of  40 W. This is right in the middle of the Atlantic, at least 2000-3000 km from any coast in any direction. Again, that points to a Submarine launched missile. The launch azimuth is roughly 80-85 degrees, towards the African coast at a distance of over 3000 km. (note added 25 Sept: but see update here that somewhat changes the picture)

The USA was testing missile intercepts near Kwajalein in the Pacific that same September 10. It is however highly unlikely that the launch that Jan seems to have captured is directly related, for the simple reason that a Trident launched in the Mid-Atlantic does not have the necessary reach to get to Kwajalein.

It is a busy time with missile tests: after the September 2 test in the Mediterranean, the September 10 tests near Kwajalein, and this potential unacknowledged test captured by Jan Hattenbach that same date, there was also a missile test in New Mexico on September 13. The Kwajalein tests were scheduled well before, but the unannounced September 2 test in the Mediterranean and perhaps also this unacknowledged September 10 test in the Atlantic might be part of ad hoc military practise exercises in connection to the continuing situation with Syria.

One question some might raise: why a Medium range Ballistic Missile launch? Why can't this not be an unacknowledged launch into Earth orbit? First: it would not be possible to keep such a launch from a US landbased site a secret. It would be seen over a wide area (like the New Mexico test) and necessitate temporary closure of parts of airspace. Moreover, altitudes and directions really point to a launch in the Mid-Atlantic. The only way to launch into Earth Orbit over the Mid Atlantic would be by an airborne launch using a Pegasus rocket.

All in all, and given the context of the situation in Syria and the September 2 test in the Mediterranean as well, it is much more likely that this is an unacknowledged SLBM test, launched from a US, British or French submarine in the Mid-Atlantic.


UPDATE 24 Sep 2013 18:00:
It has now been confirmed that this was a US Trident SLBM test launched from an Ohio-class submerged submarine! So I was right! 

Update 25 Sep 2013: New post with new info here, including re-assessment of the launch trajectory

(note: I thank Jan Hattenbach for making available his original imagery and for his permission to use it on this blog. And I thank Cees Bassa, Jonathan McDowell, Rainer Kresken and Daniel Fischer for discussions. Conclusions and any errors are solely mine).


APPENDIX  - added 24 Sept 2013, 19:50

Below are the astrometric data I used in my analysis. I did not measure every image, but enough to describe the track of the object. Measurements were done with AstroRecord astrometric software. Only the start of each trail segment was measured, except for IMG_1848 where the point where it brightens (3rd stage ignition) was measured as well. The observing site is at 28.7564 N, 17.8889 W and 2300 meter altitude. Times are accurate to ~1 second.



IMG       UT        RA        DEC
1835      21:17:08  205.061  -3.950
1838      21:17:29  206.335  -4.418 
1840      21:17:43  207.272  -4.737 
1843      21:18:04  208.731  -5.228 
1846      21:18:25  210.137  -5.743 
1848      21:18:39  211.071  -6.089 
1848_ign? 21:18:43  211.366  -6.153 
1850      21:18:53  212.081  -6.416 
1852      21:19:07  213.008  -6.790
1853      21:19:14  213.489  -6.977 
1855      21:19:28  214.450  -7.388 
1856      21:19:35  214.907  -7.585  
1857      21:19:42  215.493  -7.786