Space Hackers Prepare to Reboot 35-Year-Old Spacecraft | Hacker News Reader

Space Hackers Prepare to Reboot 35-Year-Old Spacecraft

spectrum.ieee.org

154 pointsandyjohnson050 comments

Its a pretty noble mission. I wonder what the salvage rights are. Which is to say if NASA abandons a spacecraft, and you bring it back into service, are you now the owner of it and its data? Would the original science team be able to tell you what to do with it? Even if you didn't want to?

That said, I was really disappointed that the dish antennas were dismantled at Onizuka AFB [1] (aka the 'blue cube') they were originally part of a group of space craft communication satellites and could even track things in LEO (fun to watch a giant dish following a satellite)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onizuka_Air_Force_Station

That's great.

Now, who wants to join me in trying to talk to Britain's only self-launched (i.e. launched with our own rocket) satellite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospero_(satellite)? Most of the documentation is in the National Archive (I have copies).

That's extremely interesting. The frequency band is well within what you could do with fairly simple gear. Assuming it is still alive just reaching it would already be quite something, getting some useful readings from it would be absolutely awesome.

This may be something where talking to the HAM community will be more productive than talking to the hacker community, the first step would be to reliably track it using an antenna suitable for the frequency range and checking if it is emitting anything at all before attempts to contact it would make much sense (once you have a signal to home in on it is a lot easier to prod it rather than to prod blindly until something responds).

Keep in mind that this frequency band is not exactly unlicensed territory, you're smack in the mobile aeronautical band according to ofcom. So listening is likely ok but you may need a permit to transmit at that frequency and it is not necessarily the same frequency at which the satellite will receive it's input (typically it is some other frequency to enable full-duplex).

The amateur and academic radio astronomy community may have suitable antennas. Do HAM radio operators use dishes? I thought they use mainly vertical/dipole setups?

Sure they do. In fact, the microwave band was used for the longest time by HAMs because there was no known application for it, they pretty much pioneered it and dishes were the antennas of choice for those frequencies.

http://www.g3pho.free-online.co.uk/microwaves/history.htm

Doing a 1/4 wave trackable parabolic dish for something a little under 3m wavelength is very much achievable (and is not even close to microwave frequencies, 3m is huge!). If you want better efficiency you could use a larger dish but I think that it would be easier to up the power on the transmitter than it would be to make a dish 4 times that surface that rigidly tracks an object in LEO. That's quite the little bit of hardware engineering you'd have to do there. Even a few degrees 'off' would likely ruin the signal so precision is key and a large dish catches a lot of wind.

The amateur radio bands go all the way to 1mm:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_frequency_allocat...

Assuming you're serious, what kind of equipment and knowledge would be needed?

According to the wiki page a team at UCL was planning to try, but the link to Roger Duthie's blog is dead. Any idea if they achieved anything?

Update:

Missing blog post content is at [1], courtesy of archive.org. Looks like they built some comms hardware. The full series of posts relating to Prospero is at [2]. Interesting read.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20121026003633/http://blogs.ucl.a...

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20121026003618/http://blogs.ucl.a...

It's in LEO so you'll need something like this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Parabolic...

And a suitable radio set for 'stage 1' (find the thing), and then a suitable transmitter and some modem (probably doable using a SDR or even an audio card connected to the transceiver) to actually talk to it.

That looks like a smaller version of a Malibu tracking dish that I've used :)

Assuming you're serious

Yes, but have not found anyone who is also serious and also need some funds to pay for necessary equipment.

The National Archives has lots of good stuff about Prospero, including:

"Operational control of Prospero": http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/SearchUI/Details?ur...

How much money do you think you need? A few private donations level or kickstarter level?

Consider just raising some prize money and then announcing a race for the first group to have confirmed contact with the satellite, and get out of the way?

More than money I need expertise. Although I have an amateur license I'd like to work on it with someone who is experienced with AMSAT type work.

Also, I would prefer not to do the race as the real motivator for me is the thrill of doing it and the fun of learning about how it was done.

It probably could be done as a Kickstarter and I'm guessing for the low £1,000s (radio, antenna, probably some interesting pre-amp/filter stuff).

Ok, consider yourself funded for 250 pounds, who else would like to chip in?

I'm really really rusty on VHF, do not have any required licenses and all my HAM contacts have dried up due to old age so that's pretty much all I think I can help with. The most I did in hardware terms in the last 6 months was to make an old Unitra grammophone work again, not quite in the right league :).

Thanks for that. Good to know I'm not alone in thinking that talking to that satellite would be awesome.

Mail me your IBAN please and I'll wire you the money, maybe do an official call-out for this project on your blog? That might get you some more help and/or funding. I really hope that you get this done, beware that there are a number of other satellites transmitting on the exact same frequency.

i suggest you contact the guys in the story about a potential follow up project.

Interesting, never heard of it before. Small photo gallery below:

http://cargocollective.com/ORBIT-OFFSITE_DOWLATSHAHI/Prosper...

I love the design of the Black Arrow rocket. It looks like something out of a 1950's sci-fi movie.

Also, looks like someone beat you to the punch back in 2011:

http://www.pe0sat.vgnet.nl/satellite/sat-history/prospero/

That person appears to have listened to ORBCOMM not Prospero and did not send any commands.

Hmm, sounds like he heard something on 148.000 MHz which seems to be its control frequency. Nope, he didn't send any commands. I wonder if sending commands without permission would violate some treaty or law.

I have to agree with you about the Black Arrow - here in the museum in Liverpool is one of the Black Knight rockets which were the test vehicles the Black Arrow was based on. I think the design of the Black Knight is even more fantastical, it intrigued ever me since I went to the museum as a child.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Black_Kni...

Sounds interesting; I used to run a commercial satellite network but all my gear is C/Ku/Ka. If you want to try to work it from SFBA could be fun.

I'm curious about the kind of authentication required to communicate with a satellite from the eighties. Does anyone know?

I think you just needed one of these http://imgur.com/soLoTRs

I don't get the reference. Please elaborate for us newbs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Draper

Using a Capt. Crunch whistle, you could recreate the tones telcoms used to initiate long distance calling. Meaning you could blow the whistle and get free long distance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Draper

It's a reference back to John Draper's work on the blue box. You could trick AT&T pay phones into thinking you had deposited money by playing tones which were reproducible on toys that came out of Captain Crunch boxes.

It's a plastic whistle, like the ones that were found in some cereal boxes forty years ago.

It emits a note at 2600Hz, which coincidentally was the frequency for carrier control on the Bell phone network at the time.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Draper#Phreaking

In the early early days of telephone hacking (phone phreaking) a guy named John Draper discovered that the toy whistle found in a box of Cap'n Crunch cereal would emit a tone at precisely 2600 Hz. This frequency was used by The Bell System to issue call routing instructions. With it, you could make free long-distance calls around the world. Some via satellite.

There is none. This spacecraft doesn't even have an onboard computer. The only reason people don't routinely hack spacecrafts like this is because you need a worldwide network of huge dish antennas to communicate with it. Right now, outside of the Deep Space Network, only the Aricebo dish is capable of transmitting to it. Once it gets closer to earth (within a few million miles), the 20 meter dish at Moorehead in Kentucky will be used.

You could use multiple, smaller dishes than Aricebo; coordination is required though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_interferometer

Example: The VLA http://www.vla.nrao.edu/

Please do not power off or unplug your machine.

Installing update 1 of 14560 ..

How many objects orbit at L1? Is there a risk of collision if we put many objects there?

It appears there are not very many objects currently at L1 [0]. L1 is an unstable Lagrange point, so satellites located "at" L1 generally orbit around the L1 point in a Lissajous Orbit [1]. Given that, I suspect more satellites can be put in these types of orbits around L1 than would "fit" at L1 in a more stationary configuration.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrangian_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lissajous_orbit

I wish my CV had an entry titled "Space Hacker"

Here's some info on a doppler shift detection of ISEE3, using ARECIBO:

http://spacecollege.org/isee3/isee-3-reboot-project-hardware...

Imagine that on your business card.

"Space Hacker"

Now that is hacking without a net. Get it to work on time, or the satellite dies.

The obligatory xkcd - http://xkcd.com/1337/

If this happens I am scared.

We will now have people hacking into Space Objects as the new pinnacle of extreme hacking. Someone is going to do something bad with this new idea.

In this case it requires a 400W transmitter and an extremely large parabolic antenna. Probably not something they'll have at the local hackerspace.

Satellites in LEO/MEO might be reachable with more readily obtainable equipment though.

The 400W transmitter is doable, the large parabolic antenna would be a bit harder to hide. Though, as you up the power you can use a smaller antenna. The giveaway then becomes fried birds falling out of the sky.

You also wouldn't have the hardest time finding where a 400W+ signal is coming from.

You're going 'up' with a highly directional antenna, and you're going to be transmitting very short bursts. The biggest risk will be the lobes projecting from the antenna some of those will be pointing back at the planet instead of into space. Airtraffic will have the biggest risk of interference (also because the frequency band is close).

So kidding aside you will need to make very certain that (1) you have the right permits and (2) that your gear is not inadvertently sending out a dirty signal. The narrower the better. Better start shopping for a second hand spectrum analyzer ;)

It's not even building a big dish that's the problem, it's that it has to be pointed extremely accurately and stably, and preferably able to track..t

Half of the problem is recieving signals back, as you can't just turn up the power on the satellite. I suppose if you knew exactly what command to send, and there was no form of handshaking this might not be a problem.

People have possibly been hacking 'space objects' for well over two decades, but (understandably) not much of that is in cited journals. The most you hear about it is that someone knows someone who knows someone that did something, in very rare cases the someone that did something even has a name.

That's not exactly verification, but there is so much smoke around this subject it would be hard to imagine there are no sparks or even a small fire.

Hacking a space borne piece of hardware that is in active use is probably an excellent way to become a 'person of interest' for a ton of agencies that you want no interaction with whatsoever. If you see an E2 flying in your neighbourhood while you're doing this it might be time to start packing.

The obligatory xkcd - http://xkcd.com/1337/

> Someone is going to do something bad with this new idea.

Someone is always going to do something bad with something that others would do something good with. Sitting around being afraid of it is pointless.

It isn't new... see http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/GC26Ad04.html and pages 30-31 of http://www.international-relations.com/CM2012/Satellite-Hack...

Why is Hacker News feeling like Reddit?

Get down voted for a different opinion. Didn't it cause more conversation about the issue?

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