What is Digg?Warning: The Content in this Article May be Inaccurate
Readers have reported that this story contains information that may not be accurate.Sponsored by Dragon Age: Origins
See the new YouTube feature trailer for Dragon Age: Origins view!
youtube.com/DragonAge - EA presents BioWare's new dark fantasy epic Dragon Age: Origins. '9/10' from Game Informer.
193 Comments
- nixonrichard, on 10/12/2007, -25/+268A plane with black wings is still pretty cool.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -5/+202It's obviously a weather balloon.
- swOhio, on 10/12/2007, -8/+162The mormons have wmd, time to invade Utah.
- aywwts4, on 10/12/2007, -0/+153Here is the "missile" adjusted, outlined, and compared to the McDonald Douglas MD-90 (good eye brecourt)
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/167/408498198_feff37fb9e_o.jpg - Brecourt_Manor, on 10/12/2007, -3/+113Its a McDonald Douglas MD-90. The wings are painted black along with the tail section...
http://www.muskadia.com/avions/boeing_img/MD90_vues.png - chanin, on 10/12/2007, -22/+84Unfortunately, not a cruise missile. We don't have any cruise missiles that are 100 feet long. Compare the image to the scale on the left. I would venture to say it is an airliner. But all the same - it is pretty cool that the satellite caught the aircraft just at the right time.
- banz23, on 10/12/2007, -16/+71cruise missiles have wings. They are essentially unmanned planes that fly preprogrammed paths, not missiles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tomahawk_Block_IV_cruise_missile.jpg - fudgeigor, on 10/12/2007, -24/+78Holy ***** (pun intended). I am relieved that I am not the only one who has ever wondered if I wipe my ass in a weird way... Ah, the joys of the internet!
- orbanj, on 10/12/2007, -27/+73nixonrichard is definately right... look closely and you can see wings. it's an airplane.
- aywwts4, on 10/12/2007, -5/+44If this was youtube's comment section...
"Fake!!! they just painted some pipes on the ground to look like missiles, and repeatedly spraypainted contrails into the grass for a couple years in the hopes that Google gets high quality imagery of their random countryside, see how there is no shadow! - directedition, on 10/12/2007, -2/+40Yes, cruise missiles have wings, but this image is deceptive. the wings are black and extend much further out. What gives it away is that it has two engine trails. Oh yeah, and there are proving grounds in that area. So unless this was a preemptive strike on Canada, it has no buisiness being in public air space.
- bullrassler, on 10/12/2007, -1/+36Yeah it's got wings, they just don't contrast with the ground. you can also see a slight bluish second image of the aircraft two or three lengths forward of the plane's image. This is quite common in satellite photos of moving objects.
http://www.gearthhacks.com/ look through the aircraft in flight in the advanced search for more examples. - Junkyarddawg, on 10/12/2007, -5/+33It's 100 feet long (check the scale bar). A cruise missile is 20 feet.
It's a plane. - Revan01, on 10/12/2007, -7/+33Lol, dugg up for reminding me of the ass wiping thread
- AKBryant54, on 10/12/2007, -4/+27wrong thread...
- underthelinux, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17It tells you right in the description. He was looking at the ATV trails by his house. So if you look at the ATV trails by your house, you're bound to find something.
- thenativeraver, on 10/12/2007, -8/+24I wonder where it was headed?
- Humptydank, on 10/12/2007, -19/+35
There are also two contrails. Two contrails = two engines. Two engines = airplane. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+18@dotcommer
dude did you even read the description. you should just stop digging altogether. - JimDinger, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13AHAHAHAHA Too many tabs open at once? HEHEHEHDugg you up just for the hell of it. And this is a plane look at the wings.
- killrrabit, on 10/12/2007, -11/+22Trust me, from someone who replied under someone who you should trust because he claims to work with them... it's an f*in plane and the comment above mine is from a *****.
- jetfuel, on 10/12/2007, -4/+14@dotcommer
Someone's up past their naptime! - BornWithRage, on 10/12/2007, -7/+17Yup. Buried as inaccurate.... woulda been cool if it was, though.
- aywwts4, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Yes, there are just huge groups of people who's main hobby is just searching for stuff on google earth.
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/postlist.php/Cat/0/Board/EarthMilitary/page/0 - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10"Here is the "missile" adjusted, outlined, and compared to the McDonald Douglas MD-90 (good eye brecourt)"
Good eye all of you who spotted the air liner. It was particularly impressive that you used things like the sweep angle of the wing and distance ratio between the nose and wing root to guess at the model. Those are old school sat image tricks and no one showed you how to do that, you figured it out on your own.
This was a good lesson in the challenges of remote sensing and why you don't want anyone with a political agenda interpreting the results *cough*Cheney*cough*.
And that, no matter how good your satellite images might be, it's still tough to beat someone on the ground with a point and click pocket camera. - Otto, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11>>>"Objects appear bigger when they get closer. The ruler is for the ground not stuff in the air."
The plane is, what, a couple miles above the ground? Maybe 4 miles up?
But the satellite is a few thousand miles away. Honestly, the difference of angles isn't going to be enough to make the scale bar substantially incorrect for things on the ground vs. in the air. - finista, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Canada, of course.
- nixonrichard, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9and the wings on a cruise missile are short and stubby and not swept back like the wings on the plane in the photo.
http://www.armedforces.co.uk/navy/listings/navytomahawkb.jpg - nestafett, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10@dotcomm
does someone need a hug? - Dumbledorito, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10The Mormons have cruise missiles?
- anastrophe, on 10/12/2007, -24/+31whoa. very cool.
- nizzy1115, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9i did a little photo shop to enhance the picture and reverse colorings to show the wings.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/70421462@N00/408635640/
its pretty obvious it is a plane now. - haxr, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Superman?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10"It's 100 feet long (check the scale bar). A cruise missile is 20 feet."
Objects appear bigger when they get closer. The ruler is for the ground not stuff in the air. But it does seem to be a plane. - dengzhi, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8yea its a plane, not a cruise missile.
- woody24, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6but with a telephoto lens, the perspective cannot be as trusted as one would think. Foregrounds, and backgrounds get compressed, and all size relation is lost. Also, im pretty sure a cruise missile doesn't have two jet streams. It would have one source. so why are there two trails? Definitely a jet. and the wings are there, they are just painted a very close contrast to the ground. They don't even need to black wings.
- Agret, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9The atomic bomb can burn whole buildings if someone is careless, we have a fine fire department.
- 3elevenX, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Learn facts before you post them as so. More or less contrails form through the injection of water vapor into the atmosphere by exhaust fumes from a jet engine. If there is sufficient mixing between the cold upper tropospheric air and the hot exhaust gases to produce a state of saturation, ice crystals will develop.
At any rate, it's a aircraft in the picture, not a missile - dreamlayers, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5It's interesting how some plane images on Google Maps/Earth have a clear plane image and a fuzzy plane image in a slightly different and usually overlapping position. Upon examining one I found that if I looked at the red channel, then the green channel and then the blue channel the fuzzy image moved in the direction the plane is moving. This makes it seem like the image was put together from a high resolution monochrome image and low resolution red, green and blue channels. They were taken one after the other so you can see how the plane moved.
- S1ngular1ty1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5It is not a missile. It is a plane. Please try and keep up.
- KnightMareInc, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6yeah if you zoom in you can see the rather large wings
- reknaps, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@Otto
"But the satellite is a few thousand miles away"
Satellites are not that high up, They are relatively low in orbit. Here's the wikipedia entry for the satellite "Quickbird" which this image is quite possibly from. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quickbird
Quickbird orbits at 450 km = 280 miles
But your point still is applicable to the argument - elk1, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6you can also see the shadow which looks a lot more like a plane a couple length ahead. it looks kinda bluish.
- judicar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Its on a heading almost directly for Salt Lake City which is about 100 miles away, I doubt even the U.S. military has the balls to launch a cruise missile directly at a major city. Also, contrails are caused by both engines and wingtips, check the wiki article on it. The fact that there are contrails at all suggests this is an airliner since contrails don't generally occur below 25k feet and the maximum altitude for a cruise missile is around 20k feet.
- adolfojp, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5The 147 posts above you that say exactly the same thing. :-P
- ElusiveByte, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5There are also clearly two streams of exhaust. The small white "wings" you see are two jet engines on a plane. The actual wings are dark in color, so they are hard to see.
- reticulate, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Contrails do form from engine exhaust, but it has to be pretty cold.
Somewhere around -57 degrees Celsius.
scarystuff: Contrails do form from wingtips. Do a little research and look up wingtip vortices. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Of course, they got them from the Native Americans.
- zephc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3to illustrate: http://img370.imageshack.us/img370/4203/notamissiledj9.png
at least not a Tomahawk (some missiles *do* have swept back wings, but this one's wings are too thin to be anything but a plane) - Drgn547, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5It is painfully obvious that this is a plane, with black wings, for a few reasons:
1. Cruise missile wings are perpendicular to the missile, not at an angle, like on jets (and in the picture).
2. There are twin engines, EXACTLY where they are on most 737's, what a coincidence!
3. Look at the jet stream behind the "missile"...there are two jet streams combining into one...how many cruise missiles have you heard of that have two boosters? It is from the twin engines [see number 2.] -
Show 51 - 100 of 193 discussions
The Digg Toolbar for Firefox lets you Digg, submit content, and keep track of Digg even when you're not on the Digg site. Download the official 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is 
