Mystery Chinese desert image may show enormous soil erosion study

There has been a great deal of speculation lately about a number of areas in the western Chinese desert. Some of these are clearly military (the one with concentric circles and swept wing aircraft in the center) others appear to be large scale infrastructure for some kind of space telescope (similar to the VLA in New Mexico), but with many smaller (but still substantial) devices for collection, and then there is the one below. This one, I believe, is an attempt to monitor soil erosion patterns from space.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=40.452107,93.742118&hl=de&ll=40.447764,93.744299&spn=0.005201,0.010107&num=1&t=h&vpsrc=6&z=17

These patterns below generally follow the layout of the area's drainage pattern. Other are more linear, and likely an attempt to get detailed information by cutting orthogonally across. One question which leaps to mind in this scenario is what justifies such a complex pattern? Why not just lay these wide bright lines across the drainage basin in a more rectilinear fashion? Or cover the whole area?

First lets step back a bit. If you are going to perform a study of desert erosion and drainage from space, then a nice big, visible transect line is probably a good starting point. The stripes have been cut through by rivulets from occasional rains. It may be possible to see depositions of lighter colored material where the bright material had been washed and accumulated. A few things would not be so useful. If you painted a stream bed from stern to stem, though, would you not be able to see more detail s and get more information? Possibly yes, but every one knows that water flows downstream and you don't need a desert river bed you can monitor from space to tell you that. It has been suggested that the formation below was created as a targeting system for satellites, perhaps as a location calibration system- part of a ground truth system for imaging satellites. The image below, though, doesn't seem appropriate. It is allowed to weather, it has no firm “edges”, and its pattern appears more for highlighting the local terrain. The shape, though, is generally rectilinear and has a clear alignment to the cardinal directions.

The general direction of the streams appears to be north to south. Here is the northern edge of the study area (image 2). Clearly each of the lines coincides with either a boundary of a stream bed, its presumed center or a transect of high ground presumably showing the division of drainage basins. The north eastern corner appears to have been very heavily eroded, although it may be the case that the difficulty of the terrain made it impractical to apply the bright material. It appears that the main beds have not been “painted” for the most part, aside from an occasional transect.

I suggest that the overall rectangular shape and compass line orientation serves a very specific purpose. It would allow a print out to fit almost perfectly on a standard 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. If you are collecting a time series and wish to do side by side comparison with a minimum of fuss in an office setting and you have the funding to paint a remote piece of desert that you want to monitor, why not paint it in such a way that you can snag an image out of your browser and paste it into a document and print it?

Obviously this is a guess, but I think we are looking at an enormous academic project. The demand for images of the area are likely from two sources- people who know exactly what this is (probably working on a dissertation or government study at a Chinese university) and those who have no idea what it is but are fascinated by it or worried about it.