51–60 of 105 posts
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your tangential remark is ok but anyone else's is wound up too tight. OK.
I was trying to frame the numbers for people who don’t have an engineering background. My mistake.
I was going to put it back and then I got distracted and forgot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was there authentication right from the beginning or was it patched in later?
The space communication network was ~15 years old by the time of the Apollo program and under constant expansion to meet needs. For the moon landing, it was a few dozen ground stations all over the world and 2 million miles of cable linking them together. "from the beginning" doesn't really mean much of anything, and the system would need to be pretty sophisticated just to work, even if 100% of the users were operati…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny enough the foot was restandardized to .3048m in 1959. So it is a metric-derived unit. Before that it was a feifdom unit, set by kings.
Was a tongue-in-check turn-of-phrase. This place is wound tight apparently.
I had to look it up to check: my mental model was that a foot is some king's foot but there is more of a storied history.
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…
Is this right? In a recent curiosmarc video I got the impression the astronauts on board had to enable remote commands. This was frequently done but they did have a cutoff.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you dont need to hear voyager in order to hack it. It just needs to hear you . Nasa needs the big dish to hear voyager's tiny transmitters. Someone wanting to send a disruptive message to voyager could use a massive transmitter and a relatively smaller dish. But you dont even need that. You need just enough outbound signal to jam the legitimate uplink, enough that voyager can no longer tell you from the real sign…
Even then you need a fairly large transmitter. It is quite easy to detect EM transmissions even when they are low energy. This would be incredibly easy to detect. There are plenty of regulations already by FCC, ITU and equivalent on what is allowed on what wavelength which most nations are signatories too. Violating these is already solved by law enforcement, even if a rogue nation state is protecting you it will be…
No one is going to war over ITU regulations or Voyager.