A modern shared satellite bus needs to report its own health to every tenant: bus voltage, radiator temperatures, and — crucially — the attitude quaternion. A tenant that points its payload at Kaliningrad has just told every other tenant on board that it pointed at Kaliningrad, at 4 Hz, in double-precision floats.
Coarsen the reported attitude and the pointing footprint blurs. Coarsen it enough and the ellipse contains three countries — a fact of no commercial value. Somewhere between those extremes lies the operator's disclosure policy.
R = 6,371 km (mean, IUGG).h = 550 km — Starlink v1.5 nominal shell, chosen as the modal LEO for shared-bus commercial imagery and comms today (Starlink technology page).4 Hz — typical bus telemetry cadence for pointing state on modern shared platforms.σ = 10-4° ≈ 0.36 arcsec — better than the Blue Canyon Technologies Nano Star Tracker (~3 arcsec, 3σ), i.e. laboratory-grade.σ = 10-2° ≈ 36 arcsec — representative of what modern smallsat star trackers actually achieve in flight.σ = 100° = 1° — the sun-sensor / magnetometer regime described in NASA's CubeSat 101 guide.σ = 101° = 10° — a deliberately-degraded posture: what an operator might claim they publish to "protect" the customer. The toy exists to show this claim doesn't hold.Here d is the great-circle distance from the sub-satellite point to the target. Overhead (d≈0) the slant range is ~550 km; near the horizon of the pass it grows past 1,500 km, so the same σ paints a bigger ellipse — the ellipse visibly breathes across a 5-minute window.
The drawn ellipse is amplified when the true radius is sub-pixel (small radii are boosted logarithmically so slider changes stay legible). When amplification is active a "true X m · amplified" tag appears below the target.
Two public anchors:
$20–$30 per km² for a single AOI — the modern reference for a commercial optical pass.The base value of each preset is the pass's worth if the ellipse resolves exactly one named target. Ambiguity divides that value linearly by the number of candidates the ellipse contains:
| Preset | Base | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| Kaliningrad | $50,000 | Baltic SIGINT on a single-power exclave: valuable but not multilateral. Roughly 20× the commercial-imagery equivalent for the same km². |
| Kraków | $3,000 | Optical imagery of a Central-European city with no unique military installation — priced near the raw Maxar rate, no premium. |
| Djibouti | $100,000 | Highest base in the set: US, French, Japanese, and Chinese bases visibly co-located within ~5 km. Multilateral SIGINT posture, at the ceiling of the 10×–100× premium. |
| Kerch | $30,000 | Bridge / port / ferry traffic monitoring in an active conflict zone. Between Kraków-tier optical and Kaliningrad-tier SIGINT. |
| Diego Garcia | $75,000 | Fleet-monitoring intelligence on a strategic pre-positioning anchorage. Below Djibouti (single power) but above Kaliningrad (isolated atoll magnifies signal because nothing else is nearby to confuse it). |
| Idle | $0 | The attitude channel only leaks when the payload asks it to. Non-collection passes leak nothing worth pricing. |
Assume the satellite is at closest approach (slant ≈ 550 km) and pointed at the aim point (11.567°N, 43.130°E) — chosen to sit between the co-located bases so the game is honest. Distances computed with the great-circle formula against the 13 POIs in the Djibouti set.
| σ | Footprint radius | Named POIs hit | Divisor | Earned |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.001° (research-plus) | 9.6 m | 0 | max(1,0)=1 | $100,000 |
| 0.01° (commercial) | 96 m | 0 | max(1,0)=1 | $100,000 |
| 0.1° | 960 m | 0 | max(1,0)=1 | $100,000 |
| 1° (coarse) | 9.6 km | 8 | 8 | $12,500 |
| 10° (redacted) | 97 km | 10 | 10 | $10,000 |
Two things to notice. First, the value cliff is between 0.1° and 1° — that is exactly where a typical smallsat's cheap fallback attitude sensor lives, and it is where the operator's disclosure policy actually matters. Second, pushing from coarse (1°) to "redacted" (10°) barely helps: the local POI density is already saturated, so the extra ambiguity is not paid for. The illusion of protection collapses quickly.