[HN Gopher] Somebody moved UK's oldest satellite
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Somebody moved UK's oldest satellite
Author : mindracer
Score : 60 points
Date : 2024-11-09 11:33 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| belter wrote:
| Brexit...
| adrian_b wrote:
| TLDR:
|
| While the title says that it is not known who has moved an
| abandoned UK satellite used for military telecommunications, the
| article very strongly implies that it was someone from USA, who
| does not want to acknowledge this.
|
| The satellite had been built by USA and initially operated also
| by USA, before being handed down to the UK, so they had the
| capabilities to control it at any time.
| Yeul wrote:
| UKs nuclear deterrence is built by the USA.
|
| It is a testament to deGaulle's genius that he never fell into
| that trap.
| dmix wrote:
| The UK not having to build their own SLBM is probably a good
| thing given the current state of their military procurement.
| At least from all the bad stories I've heard via the news.
| Just one less thing they have to worry about so they can
| focus on other stuff.
| exe34 wrote:
| maybe the warheads would have fitted on the rockets the
| first time...
|
| (1m10: https://youtu.be/IKQlQlQ6_pk?si=FGnFRJISuTgujgMa)
| rhplus wrote:
| Its current position above Central America would certainly have
| been useful to the US in the mid 1970s when it apparently
| moved, perhaps more useful than it would have been to the UK
| over post-colonial East Africa.
| euroderf wrote:
| If satellite warfare will be like chess, this could be a
| preparatory move.
| sparky_z wrote:
| Man, whoever did it back in the 70s must have been really
| forward thinking.
| euroderf wrote:
| Supra et Ultra!
| rep_lodsb wrote:
| This didn't happen recently. From the article:
|
| >Almost certainly, it was commanded to fire its thrusters in the
| mid-1970s to take it westwards.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" We need to avoid what I call super-spreader events. When
| these things explode or something collides with them, it
| generates thousands of pieces of debris that then become a hazard
| to something else that we care about."_
|
| There was one of these just a couple weeks ago (and that was not
| the first),
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41904346 ( _" Intelsat 33e
| breaks up in geostationary orbit"_)
| Iulioh wrote:
| ....is this really a problem in a geostationary orbit?
| WJW wrote:
| Yes, because of the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
| retrac wrote:
| There was remarkably little in the way of security for early
| satellites (or space probes).
|
| I recently encountered here on HN the suggestion that, the main
| reason you can't find particularly in-depth details on the
| Voyager space probes, is project security. Security through
| obscurity, mostly. If amateurs can detect the signal from the
| Voyager probes with a small dish antenna, it's at least
| conceivable someone might hook up a really powerful transmitter,
| aim it in the probe's direction, and start issuing commands.
| There's no cryptography, of course. The resources required to
| hijack like that in the 1970s would have been much greater, and I
| doubt being hacked was much on the designer's minds.
|
| The Apollo Program was the same; today anyone with the
| documentation, a small dish antenna, a software radio, and some
| nerd dedication, would be able to hack Apollo midflight via its
| radio link. It was the equivalent of a root prompt with no
| password on an exposed port.
|
| A bit closer to home, there's a tremendous amount of semi-
| functional orbital junk with a similar lack of security, decades-
| old computers still waiting for telecommands.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| Voyagers are so far away that possibility of owning necessary
| antenna is probably limited to nation-states or mad
| billionaires. Also DSN-sized antenna is not exactly easy to
| hide. If you are hell-bent on breaking Voyager and have such
| resources I think you could acquire necessary information
| anyway (I guess you could get uplink data for reverse-engineer
| framing format by standing near DSN antenna with SDR?).
|
| >would be able to hack Apollo midflight via its radio link. It
| was the equivalent of a root prompt with no password on an
| exposed port.
|
| Indeed, but in that case it would be port opened with a switch:
| https://youtu.be/2Jt0PsxLM7k?t=1732
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > There was remarkably little in the way of security for early
| satellites (or space probes).
|
| Compared to what? What was (or is) worth securing? From what?
| Talking about security in abstract is nonsensical
| atoav wrote:
| You are aware of the historical fact that there was a cold
| war when these things were designed?
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| Sure but that was so propaganda heavy nothing can be
| trusted from that era. What do people actually think today
| and why? Surely we live in such a free society now people
| are actually free to explain their viewpoints and
| reasoning.
|
| Besides, invoking the cold war explains little (aside from
| invoking the propaganda of the time). The soviets live-
| streamed the moon landing. The idea that they were
| necessarily antagonistic is simply inaccurate. Not to
| mention what they would gain from fucking with satellites
| remains unexplained.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _what they would gain from fucking with satellites
| remains unexplained_
|
| You don't see what America might have gained if it could
| de-orbit the USSR's early-warning satellites at will?
| ben_w wrote:
| The early stuff was spy satellites, weather satellites, and
| communication satellites.
|
| The earliest active communication satellites -- e.g. Telstar
| 1 -- was done with "take signal in from vaguely the right
| direction, amplify with pure circuitry, rebroadcast in
| vaguely the right direction", no encryption possible on the
| satellite itself, and the thing itself was so primitive it
| was spin-stabilised rather than having an actively maintained
| orientation.
|
| Weather satellites won't have mattered too much. Spy
| satellites I'm not sure about (what with this stuff being
| somewhat secretive and all), but they're obviously a thing
| where security matters.
| cfraenkel wrote:
| Define early. And it does not include this vehicle. I can't
| personally speak for Skynet 1A, but the DSCS II satellites,
| first launched in 1971 (so developed at roughly the same time),
| most definitely had an encrypted command uplink.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| > If amateurs can detect the signal from the Voyager probes
| with a small dish antenna
|
| They can't, at least not for any reasonable definition of
| small. As I'm writing this, NASA is listening to Voyager using
| the DSS-14 antenna of the Deep Space Network, a dish with a 70
| meter diameter, and the signal it receives is 10^-19 Watt.
| That's only 15000 photons per second. Coincidentally the area
| of that 70 meter dish is also roughly 15000 m^2, so a small
| dish of 1 m^2 will catch roughly 1 photon per second. Given
| that the datarate is 40 bits/second, it's physically plain
| impossible to receive the signal with a small dish.
|
| Voyager's security is that it's really far away and you need a
| big, expensive dish to talk with it.
| OJFord wrote:
| It hasn't been suddenly moved in 2024 and nobody knows why, it
| was left in an inconvenient place (now) decades ago and there's
| no (found) record of who/why.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| Was the command a wow-signal from a random source?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal
| Luc wrote:
| A simple malfunction is not considered in the article. Is that so
| unlikely, e.g. a sticky relais or some-such?
| cfraenkel wrote:
| It was spin stabilized. A stuck relay would have just created
| equal thrust all the way around the spin - ie the thrust would
| cancel out to zero. This design required thrusters that fired
| for very short intervals at a given delay after the earth
| sensor saw the earth, so the thrust would line up in the
| desired vector. In other words, no a simple malfunction cannot
| result in an orbit change.
|
| That said, it's an _assumption_ in the article that the orbit
| change wasn 't due to the cumulative effect of the normal
| gravitational perturbations the pull on all these vehicles.
| You'd need to dig up what orbit it was in 40 years ago and then
| calculate how the orbit would have drifted over those 40 yrs.
| Good luck.
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