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

bbc.co.uk

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

#41

Post by atoav »

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…

Does space race say anything to you? One way of winning a race is to become faster, another is to make others slower. You know sabotage isn't just spy novel stuff.

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

#42

Post by seabass-labrax »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #22
PittleyDunkin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You might have chosen a bad example, as both sides had many early warning satellites, and such a catastrophic 'failure' in any tactically significant proportion of them would immediately put both sides on high alert. It would be much more valuable to target individual reconnaissance or communications satellites in order to make a 'blind spot' to support a particularly important secret project, but even this scenario would be scarcely credible.

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

#43

Post by dgfitz »

vdvsvwvwvwvwv wrote: post #40
dgfitz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those using freedom units that is about 200ft diameter, or about 31,000 square feet. This works out to roughly 0.7 acres.

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.

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

#44

Post by Brian_K_White »

dgfitz wrote: post #43
vdvsvwvwvwvwv wrote: post #40

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.

Your tangential remark is ok but anyone else's is wound up too tight. OK.

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

#45

Post by margalabargala »

WJW wrote: post #24
Iulioh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

No, because of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit

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

#46

Post by Kon-Peki »

gloflo wrote: post #37
emchammer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Documentation and logs of the Voyager and Apollo projects are public, comprehensive, and fascinating reading. They do use authentication and keep the keys secret. They are literally rocket scientists.

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 operating in good faith 100% of the time.

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

#49

Post by qingcharles »

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…

These guys "hacked" an entire space probe:

https://www.theregister.com/2014/07/07/space_hackers_fire_up...

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

#50

Post by schiffern »

margalabargala wrote: post #45
WJW wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, because of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit

Actually GEO is one of the worse orbits for this, because

1) unlike LEO, there's so little drag that both large particles and small fragments are essentially up there forever

2) all the satellites are concentrated in a line, not spread out in a 2D plane or (even better) a 3D volume (collisional probability scales as number density squared)

3) despite that, the moon perturbs any uncontrolled debris into a slightly inclined orbit that nevertheless crosses GEO with >500 m/s relative velocity

If you want to intentionally rendezvous with and deorbit satellite debris, GEO is certainly one of the orbits to prioritize.

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