

Signal picked up from Russia's stranded Mars probe - udp
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15850516

======
mhw
> The agency had to modify its 15m dish in Perth to get through to Phobos-
> Grunt. This required widening the antenna's beam to catch the probe in its
> uncertain orbit.

> Perth also reduced the power of the transmission to make it more like the
> sort of faint X-band signal the craft would expect to hear at Mars.

> "We were able to get our transmission in and the commands that were sent
> then allowed the transmitter on the spacecraft to be turned on; and then we
> saw the signal coming back into our big dish," explained Dr Klaus-Juergen
> Schulz, the head of the ground station systems division at Esa-Esoc.

The hacker ethic is alive and well in space operations!

~~~
rsynnott
There's a long history of this sort of thing. All communication with Galileo,
for instance, was via the auxiliary transmitter intended to properly target
the much bigger main transmitter; the main transmitter dish was damaged on
launch.

~~~
mturmon
As part of the measures to increase the efficiency of transmission, a new
coder/decoder was developed to add about 2dB to the SNR to the transmitter.

It was called the Big Viterbi Decoder, or BVD for short. The noted information
theorist Ed Posner, who was on the design team, quipped, "I've worked on
hardware and on software for space systems, but this will be the first time
I've worked on underwear."

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gregschlom
> The best scenario is that the issues are related to a software anomaly, and
> that engineers can then upload new commands.

Dear Santa, please bring me a 15m dish for Christmas, because I badly want to
try to upload new commands too.

More seriously, I never realized that there are probably a lot of hackable
things flying above our heads, provided that you have the appropriate
equipment.

~~~
ceejayoz
I'd imagine you need a particular encryption key to do it.

~~~
gregschlom
I'd bet, though, that many things aren't very well protected, because people
designing space systems assume that nobody is going to try to mess with them,
and also because they probably use proprietary communication protocols.

But just imagine how cool it would be to ssh into a _satellite_ :)

~~~
bsnyder
A few years ago I worked for a satellite imagery company. I can tell you that
communications with space vehicles in orbit are heavily encrypted using very
strong and very proprietary algorithms that require special hardware. Because
of this encryption, I had to acquire a government security clearance.

~~~
jl6
"very proprietary" does not usually imply "very strong".

~~~
maaku
It does when "very proprietary hardware" is code for "supplied by the NSA."

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sylvinus
It's nice to see the ESA working to help the Russians, I guess they do it
mostly for science's sake!

~~~
varjag
ESA and RKA cooperate very closely in many areas.

~~~
arethuza
Arianespace is even doing commercial launches of Soyuz rockets from Guiana:

[http://www.arianespace.com/launch-services-soyuz/soyuz-
intro...](http://www.arianespace.com/launch-services-soyuz/soyuz-
introduction.asp)

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ANH
Spaceflight Now is reporting that no meaningful telemetry was picked up, but a
signal was acquired. They're going to try again from Perth today:
<http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1111/23phobosgrunt/>

------
rudru
Pinged. Ok.

------
eps
Fingers crossed.

