Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who • Hacker News Board

Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who

#21

Post by ben_w » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 9:52 PM UTC

PittleyDunkin wrote: post #15

retrac wrote: post #9

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 ho…

> 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

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.

Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who

#22

Post by JumpCrisscross » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 9:57 PM UTC

PittleyDunkin wrote: post #18

atoav wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are aware of the historical fact that there was a cold war when these things were designed?

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…

> 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?

Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who

#23

Post by rhplus » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 9:59 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who

#24

Post by WJW » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 10:06 PM UTC

Iulioh wrote: post #14

perihelions wrote: post #8

- "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" )

....is this really a problem in a geostationary orbit?

Yes, because of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who

#25

Post by dmix » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 10:07 PM UTC

Yeul wrote: post #6

adrian_b wrote: post #3

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.

UKs nuclear deterrence is built by the USA. It is a testament to deGaulle's genius that he never fell into that trap.

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.

Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who

#26

Post by aaron695 » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 10:11 PM UTC

This is literally a historian can't find paperwork from ~50 years ago.

A UK historian can't find in part classified paperwork that would be created by the U.S. Department of Defense who had control and moved a broken satellite in the 1970's

Re-framed as a puzzle, why was this location chosen it becomes interesting. But I get BBC are just chasing NPC clicks from sites like HN

Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who

#27

Post by exe34 » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 10:22 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #25

Yeul wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UKs nuclear deterrence is built by the USA. It is a testament to deGaulle's genius that he never fell into that trap.

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.

maybe the warheads would have fitted on the rockets the first time...

(1m10: https://youtu.be/IKQlQlQ6_pk?si=FGnFRJISuTgujgMa)

Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who

#28

Post by cfraenkel » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 10:31 PM UTC

Luc wrote: post #20

A simple malfunction is not considered in the article. Is that so unlikely, e.g. a sticky relais or some-such?

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.

Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who

#29

Post by Denvercoder9 » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 10:44 PM UTC

retrac wrote: post #9

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 ho…

> 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.

Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who

#30

Post by OJFord » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 10:50 PM UTC

retrac wrote: post #9

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 ho…

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.