Signal picked up from Russia's stranded Mars probe | Hacker News Reader

Signal picked up from Russia's stranded Mars probe

bbc.co.uk

89 pointsudp26 comments

> The agency had to modify its 15m dish in Perth to get through to Phobos-Grunt. This required widening the antenna's beam to catch the probe in its uncertain orbit.

> Perth also reduced the power of the transmission to make it more like the sort of faint X-band signal the craft would expect to hear at Mars.

> "We were able to get our transmission in and the commands that were sent then allowed the transmitter on the spacecraft to be turned on; and then we saw the signal coming back into our big dish," explained Dr Klaus-Juergen Schulz, the head of the ground station systems division at Esa-Esoc.

The hacker ethic is alive and well in space operations!

There's a long history of this sort of thing. All communication with Galileo, for instance, was via the auxiliary transmitter intended to properly target the much bigger main transmitter; the main transmitter dish was damaged on launch.

As part of the measures to increase the efficiency of transmission, a new coder/decoder was developed to add about 2dB to the SNR to the transmitter.

It was called the Big Viterbi Decoder, or BVD for short. The noted information theorist Ed Posner, who was on the design team, quipped, "I've worked on hardware and on software for space systems, but this will be the first time I've worked on underwear."

There's also a movie on something like this, about the moon landing: "The Dish" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0205873/). Was a good movie I believe, but it's been a while.

> The best scenario is that the issues are related to a software anomaly, and that engineers can then upload new commands.

Dear Santa, please bring me a 15m dish for Christmas, because I badly want to try to upload new commands too.

More seriously, I never realized that there are probably a lot of hackable things flying above our heads, provided that you have the appropriate equipment.

Here's one example of a (trivially) hackable thing flying above our heads:

http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles/U.S.-Navy-Satellite...

re: software anomaly

I'll have to remember that next time one of my clients finds an unexpected feature in their application.

There certainly are hackable things flying over your head. However, with your 15m dish men in black suits will zero-in on your location in a flash, and you'll be behind bars before you know it - probably before you can focus on the target out on space. So I'd suggest palling around with the chinese and russians and see if they'll provide you with some AA if you plan on doing that. Like anything else these days, you use cut-and-dried old fashion hacking techniques to gain access to the computer systems. There was just an article on this site about the russians hacking into some sewage plant. They didn't hack the valves and equipment directly, they guessed a password and got into the computers controlling the whole thing.

I'd imagine you need a particular encryption key to do it.

I'd bet, though, that many things aren't very well protected, because people designing space systems assume that nobody is going to try to mess with them, and also because they probably use proprietary communication protocols.

But just imagine how cool it would be to ssh into a satellite :)

A few years ago I worked for a satellite imagery company. I can tell you that communications with space vehicles in orbit are heavily encrypted using very strong and very proprietary algorithms that require special hardware. Because of this encryption, I had to acquire a government security clearance.

"very proprietary" does not usually imply "very strong".

It does when "very proprietary hardware" is code for "supplied by the NSA."

It would be cool, but the latency would drive me crazy.

Just like the people that design SCADA systems in fact

Actually no, these things pretty much fly in the open, chiefly out of necessity (recovering from bit transmission errors is much more complicated when encrypted, and uses up valuable power as well). Usually you have to know a prefix code to get the probe to listen, a la Dr. Strangelove.

It really is security-through-obscurity. Though that definitely isn't considered safe, a lot of spacecraft (especially deep-space ones) are pretty damn obscure. The true weakest link is the security at the ground station, not some fool with a 40 meter dish.

Older satellites might have crummy encryption like DES and might be hackable... (not a security guy, so talking out of my ass)

It's nice to see the ESA working to help the Russians, I guess they do it mostly for science's sake!

In practice, all national/supranational agencies tend to collaborate to an extent on these things.

Cold war is over.

ESA and RKA cooperate very closely in many areas.

Arianespace is even doing commercial launches of Soyuz rockets from Guiana:

http://www.arianespace.com/launch-services-soyuz/soyuz-intro...

Spaceflight Now is reporting that no meaningful telemetry was picked up, but a signal was acquired. They're going to try again from Perth today: http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1111/23phobosgrunt/

Pinged. Ok.

Fingers crossed.

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