Satellite mystery of giant lines spotted in China's Gobi desert

A Google Maps satellite has spotted a series of bizarre structures during a sweep of the Gobi desert in China.
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To add to the intrigue, they are located on the borders of Gansu province and Xinjiang in northwestern China - an area that the superpower uses to build military, space and nuclear equipment.
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In fact, some of the sites are less than 100 miles from Jiuquan, where China’s space programme headquarters and launch pads can be found.
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In two images, available on Google Earth, reflective rectangles up to a mile long can be seen, a tangle of bright white intersecting lines that are clearly visible from space.

Other pictures show enormous concentric circles radiating on the ground, with three jets parked at their centre.

In one picture from 2007, a mass of orange blocks have been carefully arranged in a circle. In a more recent image, however, the blocks, each one the size of a shipping container, appear to have been scattered as far as three miles from the original site.

Another image shows an array of metallic squares littered with what appears to be the debris of exploded vehicles while another shows an intricate grid that is some 18 miles long.
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Cazzie said:

wfg, you left out the part where you tell us what it all means.

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wfgodot said:

The best I can come up with is that it represents a grid I would most likely get lost in.

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Cazzie said:

wfg, you left out the part where you tell us what it all means.

Click to expand...

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It turns out that the structures are most likely used to calibrate China's spy satellites, according to Natalie Wolchover of website Life's Little Mysteries.

She spoke to Jonathon Hill, a research technician at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, which operates many of the cameras used during Nasa's Mars missions.

The existence of these calibration targets may seem suspicious or revelatory, but Hill said it really isn't; China was already known to operate spy satellites, along with many other countries, including the U.S.

'An [American] example I found just now is a calibration target for the Corona spy satellites, built back in the 1960s, down in Casa Grande, Arizona,' Hill told Wolchover.
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