[g4zj]

Wouldn't NASA then almost certainly be aware of this as well?

[parsimo2010]

This satellite’s mission is soil readings. Most scientists are not part of the intelligence community. They may have noticed anomalous readings and excluded them from their analysis, but they don’t really have anyone to talk to about the military implications. Plus, while this is cool that you can detect this interference with a science satellite, the major space powers all have military and intelligence satellites that can map the interference at greater precision, so the NASA scientists can pretty much ignore this unless they are particularly interested in the soil readings in this part of the world.

[frandroid]

It's not impossible that the Pentagon could have thought "alright, we want these readings. is there a civilian use for this kind of data and decided to see if a civilian project could be sprung up... Though that's more of a Cold War conceit. These days they would just do it themselves, it's probably an easy and cheap project.

[g4zj]

Thank you for that explanation. It was very helpful. :)

[dakr]

I don't think this is lost on anybody, even if it's not the main mission. SMAP also provides a near-real-time data product which may interest people in this area.