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Space Science

Controlling Space Satellites 116

Posted by Hemos from the leet-hax0r dept.
Cainxinth writes "The New Scientist reports secure internet servers will blast-off into space for the first time on Thursday with a mission to get as beat up as possible. If the specially-toughened chips survive, they should allow future internet users to control satellites from their desktop." Sparc chips - interesting concept.
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Controlling Space Satellites More

Controlling Space Satellites

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  • Don't worry - we can make laser guns like The Cardinal of the Kremlin and blow them out of commision. Or is that SDI stuff not really going to work ;).

    Tell me what makes you so afraid
    Of all those people you say you hate

  • The telescope should have fail-safe processes on board to prevent such a thing.

    Hubble has them.

  • Jurisdiction in Orbit? (Score:3)

    by vergil ( 153818 ) <vergilb&gmail,com> on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @12:39PM (#621312) Journal
    Servers in Space ... interesting.

    Would data stored on board an orbiting server be subject to the jurisdiction of an earthbound nation?

    Sincerely,
    Vergil

  • sorry...my bad. I meant ceramic..not silicon. Sorry about that.

  • Bumper sticker: "This is MY Iridium satellite. I nudged it to this orbit fair and square. Iridium abandoned it, and I claimed it. Go find your own bird."
  • But ever wonder what they might run into? What if they ran into the hubble with one of those servers? I would be wetting myself.. But oh wait.. I bet the server could survive that!
  • Oh, I get it. Some terrorist is going to hack one of these things and then threaten to bring one of them down in a heavily populated area unless his demands are met... bad idea. Even worse, some harmless script kiddie could accidentally plunge one of them into the atmosphere alerting our early warning systems and causing a global political crisis. Very bad idea.

    Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
    Domain Names for $13
  • You can really move the data closest to the demand.
  • Quick, get your M-16 with the silencer and lasersight and assassinate the Sparc chip designers before they can bring this plan to fruition!

    If that fails, get your SPF 2 Million Sunblock.
  • You forgot JonKatz.
  • RE: The New Scientist reports secure internet servers will blast-off into space for the first time on Thursday with a mission to get as beat up as possible.

    Which means, paradoxically, that because we're expecting to see damage, etc. there will be absolutely no mishap at all that will cause any damage whatsoever to the test machines.

    Contrast that with other recent space experiments: the effort through ruthlessly rugged engineering to produce an aborted mission caused by an inability to standardise measurements in metric, the effort through ruthlessly rugged engineering to produce a probe we subsequently lost somewhere around Mars (was it?), never mind the ruthless engineering that went into producing space-worthy O rings on the Space Shuttle...


  • The conic solid must stop somewhere before the moon nd planets, or these would be in the airspace of the country they were over at the time.
  • It's not a "NASA mission". No NASA money is involved. It's a UK project. NASA is not the only agency that sends stuff into space.
  • Surely you aren't suggesting that electronic satelites won't work; they've been in operation since Sputnik!

    Amateur satelites are not news either, with the first being OSCAR 1 launched in 1961!

    Yes, I am aware that OSCAR 1 did not last but a few weeks, but there are quite a few QSLs done on it and OSCAR 2 followed soon after. The reason for the failure of both were a dead batteries; these satelites did not recharge from solar energy. After all,

    • they were made by amateurs in garages, etc.

    So yes, we do have the technology to send electronic satelites into space: and we've been doing so for nearly 40 years.

  • She had a scope too. Besides, I'm just reciting something from Terminator 2, which happened to come on yesterday. I thought the skynet reference made it obvious enough.
  • Right--the original poster was asking if the sat could be shut down, and the answer is that the sat is pretty much outside of all governmental control once it's in orbit, short of overt acts of war. :) I'm not disputing that parties involved in maritime traffic who are within national borders or territorial waters can't be held accountable under the law.

    Of course, I could be misremembering what the original question was.
  • I dunno, we've put up two comsats already in the last year on behalf of a couple of not-to-be-named entrepeneurial outfits who really want to build an anonymous ecash economy, and both of 'em have gone silent. They're still up there, you can see them with a telescope, but they won't last much longer. We haven't been able to talk to the first one for about six months, and the second just went dead last month. I thought the first one was a fluke, but twice? We're trying to harden the third one, and I sure hope it works, because the boss has been dropping nasty hints. I think he's just joking, but you can never tell with these guys.

  • knock out power to large sections of Canada

    Actually, protective relaying in large power systems are designed with very sensitive equipment to quickly detect relatively small currents which would normally indicate a problem, like a lightning strike or short-circuit, and shut down transmission lines. This is preferred to having flying balls of molten aluminum falling to earth, or having a dangling wire electrocute nearby farm animals.

    As it turns out, solar activity mimicks the non-balanced currents found in bona fide power-system faults. And these transmission lines, being hundreds of miles long, make like great antennas to pick up the solar interference.

    The power system simply shuts down because the equipment senses a fault. No damage.

    This satellite, on the other hand, is designed to be exposed to the spaceborne fields and such, and it might be fully expected that over time, the materials used would degrade to the point of causing failure. Destructive testing at it's finest...

  • hey !!! mark this up. i had a good laugh, so take my measly karma points if you want and mark the parent of this to 5 - FUNNY!!!

  • Enemy Of The State (Score:3)

    by weston ( 16146 ) <westonsd@@@canncentral...org> on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @11:35PM (#621329) Homepage
    they should allow future internet users to control satellites from their desktop

    "It's already done."

    I just saw Enemy Of The State... the NSA was tracking Will Smith and Gene Hackman with desktop controlled satellites. So this technology is already available.

    Now, if only I could get a hold of the Supercomputer technology from Superman III -- you know, where Richard Pryor gets his MCSE and then hacks the payroll system and then builds the world's most powerful computer...
  • At last! I've been waiting for P3D to go up for years. Does anyone know what the Oscar designation will be. IIRC, P3D should receive an Oscar number after it successfully reaches orbit.

    Mike
    KE4ZAF, hanging out in Switzerland
  • This is being done by the European Space Agency, nothing at all to do with NASA.

  • Why don't you and the laser get a freakin' room?


    --
    Program Intellivision! [schells.com]
  • I know others will say it, but I feel the need to reiterate this comment anyway.

    What happens when hackers compromise these 'secure' servers? I pray that the designers aren't making too much control available through the internet; but reading the story, it appears that they plan to eventually make full control of satellites available through the internet.

    If that won't make a great target for hackers, I don't know what will. I do hope that reason will prevail and we stick to controlling satellites through truly secure microwave uplinks; but what happens if we don't?

    Does the picture of a satellite careening towards Washington, DC, please you? (Okay, bad example :) I don't want to live in a world where hackers will have the potential for that kind of power.

    Why not just stick with what works? Why does everything have to be internet enabled?

  • it might have been a little more than 2 feet...one of my friends told me there was no way it would break...so..being the curious person i was...i dropped it. (it was no good anyways.) and it shattered. I was gonna make a keychain from it...i wasn't all that happy with him. his nick is mattH if you want to flame him for me. :)

  • The cold temperature in space reaching -273 degrees Celcius would provide a damn good way of cooling processors.
  • why not throw some cache servers up on sapce, cut down on latency?

  • Misrepresentations abound (Score:5)

    by bughunter ( 10093 ) <[ten.knilhtrae] [ta] [retnuhgub]> on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @12:43PM (#621337) Journal
    This New Scientist article goes to great lengths to misrepresent the primary mission of the STRV satellites. New Scientist is by far one of the worst abusers of this sort of spin doctoring. Any link to a New Scientist story should be carefully reviewed before taken seriously.

    Specifically, these aren't servers - they're testbeds using two Sun Sparc chips among dozens of other devices. All the devices are being evaluated for their tolerance to space radiation. Sure, these chips are used as server CPUs, but they're also useful in avionics and instrumentation. I wager they'll see much more use in the latter two roles.

    It would have made an equally interesting and much more truthful article if the author had dug just a little deeper and described how challenging it is to make rad-hard electronics - how tiny details of IC layout can make a device susceptible to low levels of radiation... how the different types of radiation occur in different orbits... the different damage mechanisms for these different radation types... about the South Atlantic Anomaly... how the continuous spectrum of natural radiation is nearly impossible to reproduce in the laboratory, making this the only way to test materials, devices, and surfaces.

  • depends if you have the equipment to "down" it.
  • For some reason when I saw the little smidget saying "they should allow future internet users to control satellites from their desktop"...

    ...I thought of Battle Bots. Interesting.
  • "...internet servers will blast-off into space for the first time on Thursday ..."

    I've always wanted to see my personal debian box fly into space with its own rocket boosters. Imagine your server with rocket boosters flying in space! I'd like to see an NT station versus a UNIX station in space....with rocket boosters!
  • and i definitely do NOT disregard them, a server in space will allow us to continually update data and programming of exploration vehicles after they are launched. i was really miffed when the mars probe screwed up because of a metric-english conversion mistake. an Internet server in the thing would allow low-cost redundant fact checking.

    Also, I could see exploration vehicles equipped with monitoring equipment (cameras, bioassay equipment, etc.) with open-ended use. Right now, when we design an exploration vehicle for Mars each piece of equipment on it must be designed with a fixed use, associated with fixed programming and a narrow spectrum of response. With a server-equipped exploration vehicle, any new program that can make use of the equipment could be uploaded after launch.

    Internet connections to such an exploration vehicle would allow hackers to take it hostage. Inasmuch as it's possible I would advocate the Internet publication of up to date data from exploration vehicles, to allow "open source" verification and analysis, but would keep control of the exploration vehicle separate. Or, scientific instuments on the vehicle could be exposed to the Internet, but propulsion would be controlled by conventional radio.

  • Re:Interesting... But Safe? (Score:3)

    by g_mcbay ( 201099 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @01:51PM (#621342)
    or can be told to collide with the sun

    A hack that would allow an earth orbiting satellite to somehow collide with the sun would be the mother of all hacks. Not only would the satellite's security system be violated, but so would known physical laws of the universe. Sounds cool!

    Also, if someone managed to collide the satellite into the Sun using this super hack, the only outcome would be that the satellite would be destroyed (actually it would burn up long before it ever got close enough to actually collide with the Sun). Its not going to make the Sun supernova and kill us all or anything sci-fi-stupid like that.

  • Does a satellite with a giant napster server or DeCSS source become under whose jurisdiction? It would be too costly for such a practice but makes me have another idea. Can people make floating servers on big ships and just sit outside the 200km sea limit?
  • "One day maybe you will enter your credit card details online and ask the satellite to turn and take a picture for you," says Nigel Wells of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency

    cute idea, to bad you didn't get it ten years ago. Now digicrime [digicrime.com] is taking all the cash.

  • Or even a diskless server... run it on hardware not so fragile. You could just increase the RAM in current relaying birds. Or, if the sats that are up there now have extra memory in them, maybe someone could use that as cache for the net. Hey, what ever happened to Iridium?

  • The ramifications will be huge - existing space missions such as Galileo has flown through intense radiation fields and still operates, gathering usefull data.

    This experiment with better shielding and processors built to handle radiation, will help extend similar future missions.

    As an additional aspect, satellites, probes, may be reduce risks of mission failure which could help encourage politicians to spend considerably more money on further explorations.

    But seriously, I'm curious about how many terrestrial applications are affected by stray radiation which could be made more reliable by this technology. I'm imagining microchip probes during CAT scans, pacemakers that won't go "bing", and of course reliable smart equipment in nuclear research.

  • Actually, yes, it would be. (Score:3)

    by human bean ( 222811 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @01:58PM (#621347)
    Firstly, IANAL. I have been involved with the sat industry for some time, and as I recall, the sovereign boundaries of nations are defined by both treaty and precedent as conic solid stretching from the center of the earth, through the boundary of the country, off into infinity, more or less. Thus the concept of a country's airspace. That country's laws apply within.

    However, trying to get an peace officer of one of these countries to arrest someone in the Clarke orbit may be another story.

    If I recall correctly, a UN treaty gives equatorial countries certain payments in return for the use of geosynchronous orbits that inhabit their airspace.

  • Maybe the satellite has special shielding or something, but there's enough wired connections down here on the ground that you can probably, for the most part, only use wireless to get a couple miles to the base station/cell tower/802.3 (# correct?) hub.

    Thats IEEE 802.11b [ieee.org] (aka wavelan [wavelan.com]) you're thinking about. IEEE 802.3 is Ethernet, IIRC. And what you call a hub is normally refered to as an access point, although they are similar in function. They're not equivalent, though, even if you don't count the wireless part (duh!). Access points usually include a router and nifty features such as NAT and DHCP.

  • I've read more accurate, and better-researched science articles in my local tabloid paper! As far as I can see, this article fails a basic common-sense test.

    As far as a satellite is concerned, it doesn't matter if the commands it is issued come from a machine on a TCP/IP-based LAN in a satellite operator's headquaters connected to a satellite dish, or a machine connected to the wider net. What having a SPARC chip on the satellite has to do with things I *really* don't know.

    As far as the operators of satellites are concerned, when a satellite costs millions of dollars, do you seriously think that they're going to let Joe Sixpack send direct orders to a satellite and run the risk of crackers getting into their systems - even if they build a strong-crypto buzzword-compliant secure system, and all orders are sanity-checked by software. When you consider the cost of a satellite and the cost of a technician, it's pretty damn cheap to have a human process requests for usage of satellite resources and let that technician issue the appropriate orders to the satellite.

    In any case, I'm appalled that such a crappy article could make it into what I believed was a reasonably reputable magazine. Is it a case of mindlessly regurgitating a press release, or a truly clueless journalist? Either way, the journalist and the section editor responsible should be shot at dawn.

  • by this argument the soviets putting up sputnik would be an act of war, wouldn't it?

    I believe that the sovereign boundaries of nations end at the atmosphere.

  • Isn't it cheaper to perform radiation testing in an artifical space environment than to blast chips into space in hope that they will survive? You can have a lot more control over radiation dosage in a manmade system so you can see what fails at what dosage if you use terrestrial experiments.

    I thought radiation levels in space were already well understood.

  • Assuming you had suggested something more plausable, like trying to ram MIR or the ISS, it would still be very difficult to accomplish without some sort of side-looking sensors. A camera satelite probably can't focus in close enough to use it's camera as a terminal guidance system. Without terminal guidance, it's very dificult to track two objects moving rapidly through space well enough to get them to collide. Something passing within a couple of miles is considered a near miss, in most circumstances.

    On the other hand, someone could try and create an orbit that intersects the orbits of several other satelites, then disable the watchdog timer and jam the system so nobody has control fo the satelite. The main effect of this, though, would probably just be to cause the other satelites to lose some observation time and fuel while moving to a safer orbit. Like I said, it's tough without terminal guidance.

    Very little, if anything, would make it to the ground if someone tried crashing one of these into a city.

    Your biggest danger is some script kiddie trying to impress some girl by writing her initials with "shooting stars" and de-orbiting several satelites. Never underestimate the determination of a sex-starved 14 year boy. (Or those whose crotches still think they're 14.)

    Karl

    I'm a slacker? You're the one who waited until now to just sit arround.

  • Ok... let me get this straight. These things have Sun processors in them???? What makes Sun think they will work in the harsh environment of space, when they can't even stand up to the occasional cosmic ray down here??? Or better yet, maybe they can apply those technical changes to the processors down here so E-bay can quit crashing. (But that would be too expensive... oh wait... what was I thinking.) B
  • ahhh, okay....so this is just an experiment to see if the CPUs can hold up under these conditions? okay....that makes a hell of a whole lot more sense.
  • Great explanation. I just have to add that the stuff can go much further then just a couple miles. Using legal equipment, I (with the help of a couple friends) networked three towns up in northern Canada. The longest shot was ~45km. It worked great and this was just using standard 1/2watt amps and 24db antennas. (And linux boxes to do the routing... One on a mountaintop.)

    You can also buy 10watt amps and bigger (up to 6' diameter) antennas. These should significantly extend the range past the 50km mark. But be careful not to stand in front of those antennas for too long - 10watts of microwave radiation passing through your body isn't going to do your prostate any good. ;)

    Willy
  • This _is_ true to a certain extent, however a sniper is never going to be using an M16! Most sniping weapons are either 30 Calibre or 50 Calibre (gulp!) plus yer basic M16 isn't terribly accurate past about 300 yards (although civilian versions with match barrels, better sights etc..) are used out to 600yards in matches to extremely good effect.

    Elgon
  • Sorry, I got a bit carried away. I just don't like the inappropriate use of words like 'silencer', 'sniper' and horror of horrors 'Dum-Dum bullets'

    Elgon
  • What about tele-riding a car on the Moon? Just send tele-commanded mini-cars on the Moon and set some relay satellites. It should be possible to drive a car with a latency of 2 secs, if speed is not eccessive and the car has good bumpers. (Mars will have to wait for faster-than-light communications :-( ).

    Or, even better, what about organizing a car race of several day, where the drivers have to figure out ou to reach point B from point A and how to go around obstacles? I guess you could call it a space-tele-rally.

    Entartainement industry today has much more money than any government agency. Having fun with space might be the solution to restart the space race (yes, we live in an absurd world.)

  • Awesome idea.... demolition derby for satelites...

  • PSS (Score:1)

    by romco ( 61131 )
    "they should allow future internet users to control satellites from their desktop."

    PSS Personal Satellite Server. Where to I
    sign up?
  • Ham radio operators have used packet radio servers on satellites.
  • I never trust New Scientist very much. They'll report anything. Have you noticed how many things featured in there are nominated for Ig Nobels?
  • I hope these things don't start assimilating us. =)
  • This certainly beats those "dropped from 3 feet with minimal damage" stress tests.....geez! I once dropped a pentium chip about 2 feet and the whole silicon package shattered. I dunno about sending it into space though....

  • about just this thing.

    Back in the fifties there was a lot of wrangling between the UN and the US about such, and the moon was specifically declared international territory.

    Folks around the world thought it was plenty funny, until we actually went there.

  • I once dropped a pentium chip about 2 feet and the whole silicon package shattered.

    Really? Wow. When I was an inexperienced and careless teenager, I dropped quite a few Pentiums (on different occasions) from desktop height and from standing height, and never had one fail. Sure, perhaps I shortened the life expectancy, but it sounds like your chip must have had other problems.

  • Good question. The Outer Space Treaty of 1966 (67?) may have changed this.

    A good place to look would be the American Society of International Law. I read a while back that they had opinions about how to legally arrest extraterrestrials.

  • Orbital Lasers (Score:4)

    by Barche ( 233137 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @12:13PM (#621368)
    Finally, the first step to bring Orbital Lasers to the masses. I've always dreamt of a site that would (perhaps even for a modest fee) allow you to scorch random parts of the world. Maybe laser control could be regulated in a way similar to the moderation system on this site.
  • One thing I thought of, Satellite web servers.. That means that long after the Earth is gone, people will still be able to go to www.InOrbitPORN.com and get their daily dose.

    But seriously, is this a safe thing to do? It all seems to Big Brother-ish. First off, Im sure this would be a major hack target... A satellite that can take pictures anywhere on earth, or can be told to collide with the sun, or fire a giant laser, blah blah blah. I dig how everything is going online and interactive, but theres a few things we should hold sacred. What's next? Going to missile.gov, entering in your CC# and being able to control a real live ICBM?

    ----------------------------------

  • What?! (Score:2)

    by Seumas ( 6865 )
    "they should allow future internet users to control satellites from their desktop."

    This is a joke, right?

    I mean, there are just so many smart-assed comments one could make about this, but the statement itself is enough...

    Internet users are amused by the dancing hamsters and fake nude celebrity pics -- controlling orbiting space stuff is a BAD IDEA.
    ---
    seumas.com

  • Actually...almost the opposite I would think...the temperature in the sunlight up there is probably pretty rough, and to top it off there is no atmosphere to carry heat away. We use air or liquid cooling here on earth...what happens when there's no air or liquid to move the heat to?

  • A Telerobotic Future Is A Fun Future (Score:3)

    by LHOOQtius_ov_Borg ( 73817 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @12:17PM (#621372)
    Telerobotics over the Internet, especially Space telerobotics, is one of the cooler things being done online (it sure beats yet another porn server). Now, though this system doesn't yet allow telerobotic control of satellites, they do leave open the possibility for future flights. Survival Research Labs (www.srl.org) has already on several occasions opened up control of their various dangerous robots to Internet users, at some performances and installations, and it was a lot of fun for all involved. Controlling satellites would be at least as fun - not necessarily giving us control of their thrusters, but cameras and sample-collection arms would be cool.

    E-commerce payments for custom satellite photos, though, opens up a whole new realm of spy technology for the business and consumer markets. Just think, punch in your credit card # and take a picture of that neighbor's yard that's all closed-in by a tall fence... Or your competitor's shipping depot... or whatever... Of course, geeks like us will instead (or also) want to buy custom picture of our favorite astronomical body - but I wonder which type of photos they were referring to in the announcement... hmmm...

    Finally, I wonder... why aren't they testing a SETI@Home-like system where the satellite collects whatever data it collects, and users download processing software from a NASA ground station, receive data over the on-satellite server, process it and then... either send it to the ground station, or, in some applications, results could be sent back to the satellite and fed into software running on board that determines the satellite's next actions if the user's machine has uploaded some results which impact the task being carried out... THAT would be cool... SETI@Home-type work with real-time feedback loops with the satellites collecting the data... "Hey satellite, we think we found something, look more closely here..."

  • Will the tech support team for this service be located up at some sort of space station, or outsourced down here to earth?

  • WHY? (Score:1)

    by snyrt ( 151824 )
    okay, i don't understand this. Why is there a rush to get servers into orbit? is it as if we can't connect to servers to which we are hardwired? having them in orbit just allows more room for errors and lag. The basis of this experiment escapes me. It seems to me that all of the cons here severly outweigh the pros. Hackers, lag, death, destruction, collisions are all cons. and, um.....where are the pros? oh, right, we get to control multi-million dollar equipment from our desktop. what are they thinking? if there are any ideas on what the pros are, tell me.
  • One would hope that NASA could design a system that wasn't quite that easily tampered with... They pretty much know where the sun is, for one thing, and... using the satellite's own telemetry readings as precedential over anything over the 'net... not look at the sun...

    Also, presumably, the 5|z would need to figure out more complicated commands than just "look here" but rather how to simulate the patterns the system was looking for... let me rephrase what I said above: "hey satellite, here is some data" "hmmm, that looks like it might be interesting, let me look more closely over there..."

    Finally, of course, you would put some constraints on what the thing was supposed to be doing, and some threshholds past which it would say "oh, someone is messing with me, I better inform a ground station and lock-out Internet access for a period..."

    Yeah, no system is perfectly secure, but come on, give the folks at NASA a little credit here... SRL, which is a bunch of volunteers making robot performance art, could build a system where you could control a dangerous robot and not kill anyone, I suspect NASA can protect their satellites from having anything too stupid done with them...

  • Orbital MIND CONTROL Lasers! Now you too can turn the Boy Sprouts into a Weird group!

  • I think that puts them out of the jurisdiction of any pansy-ass country that wants it banned, too!
  • Err, sorry about the subject line, it should be
    "Radiation testing on Earth vs. in orbit"

  • Hillary Rosen (sp?)
    - or -
    Her Evil Highness

    whichever you prefer
  • Ok smartass, maybe it was a bad example hehe.

    ----------------------------------

  • Re:GEO slots are assigned to countries (Score:3)

    by rjh ( 40933 ) <rjh@sixdemonbag.org> on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @02:16PM (#621381)
    Space falls under maritime law; any assignment of geosynch orbits to countries is purely voluntary on the part of the countries who agree to it. For an analogue, consider sea lanes; certain sea lanes have been traditionally used by one power or another, and other powers avoid those sea lanes (fishing areas, etc.) to prevent conflict. But if you want to sail those lanes, there's nothing in maritime law which says you can't.

    Warning: I'm not an international law expert. (In fact, I've got doubts that international law even exists in a practical sense; if I'm right, then the entire argument is very moot.)
  • Isn't space something like -270 degrees because of the Penzias-Wilson discovery of the radiation left over from the big bang? I guess I *could* look it up to be sure. Ok, this is going to get moderated Offtopic fast.
  • I read this and it just *so* reminded me of Kilgore Trout's story "No Laughing Matter", as described in Kurt Vonnegut's "Timequake".

    Elgon
  • In space, there's a continuous energy spectrum of ionizing radiation that is fiendishly difficult to recreate in the laboratory. In the lab, you can get radiation at a single energy, or more typically, a handful of energies, from a single radioactive isotope very inexpensively. At a linear cost increase, you can add more spectral lines from additional isotopes. But at no point are you going to reproduce the space environment that way.

    If you were ambitious, you could try is a variable linear accelerator, with gradient filters and attenuators - a very expensive setup. But you still are only going to be able to reproduce a relatively narrow region of the energy spectrum.

    So the bottom line is, if you can get an inexpensive launch, it's actually cheaper to toss up a big, well-instrumented bundle of test articles than it is to build a test facility that can reproduce the space environment.

  • The Defense Department's Space Command [af.mil] keeps track of all the objects orbiting the earth. The early warning system can tell the difference between a missile launch and junk reentering the atmosphere. It is very difficult to bring a satellite down on a specific location. Even if you could, the damage would be minimal.

  • Re:Space heatsink (Score:3)

    by HeghmoH ( 13204 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @02:29PM (#621386) Homepage Journal
    Sorry, wrong.

    Space practically has NO temperature. In order to have a temperature, there must be substance. It's a pretty hard vacuum up there, and there's little enough stuff floating around that it doesn't matter what temperature it is. Vacuum is a very, very good insulator, since the only way to get rid of heat is by radiation. So you actually have the opposite problem.
  • I've read that using a suppressor with a high velocity rifle, like the M16, makes it difficult for the enemy to acoustically locate the source of a shot, which would be very useful for a sniper.
  • This is one of the things that annoys me: firstly it is not a silencer: it is a supressor. Secondly (assuming it is an M16/AR-15 variant in .223 calibre, aka 5.56 NATO, 5.56*45 etc...) putting a 'silencer' on the front of the rifle ain't going to do too much, yeah it will silence the muzzle blast and hide the flash, but given that a 55 grain .224 inch diametre bullet comes out of that muzzle at around 3250 fps the bullet itself makes quite a bit of noise. Oh, and using a laser sight for any kind of distance shooting is stupid - even at night the spot becomes damn hard to see.

    Elgon
  • Who cares about those STRVs when AMSAT's Phase 3-D satellite, built and paid for by amateur radio operators, is also payload on Ariane 507! This new bird will bring satellite comms to a much wider group of amateurs, with modes including voice, data, and even a video camera pointed back at the earth.

    Look at the way-cool picture of the launch preparations here. [amsat-dl.org], or get more information about Phase 3D at here. [amsat.org]


    there are 3 kinds of people:
    * those who can count

  • I don't know if this is the same chip, but ESA was working on the design and production of a radiation hardened version of the SPARC.

  • Maritime Law only applies to the ship... (Score:3)

    by Speare ( 84249 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @05:00PM (#621392) Homepage Journal

    If the "captain" of the "vessel" is ashore, you can bet your butt that they can prosecute.

    Surface computers sending or receiving data to such a satellite would be the vulnerable point of inquiry. Unless your transmissions are laser-narrow, they'll be detected. If they suspect you already, they will confiscate what they need to pin the rest of the case.

    As an analogy, consider a remote controlled boat packed with contraband. There's several potentially culpable parties: those caught where the contraband left port, those caught where the contraband arrived, and those who were ashore but responsible for the arrangement of said boat.

  • Yeah, I agree - it was oversimplified... on purpose. I figured that there might be only about three people who would understand, or care, about the details.
  • Which part are you labeling false?

    No one has yet build a facility that accurately represents the full spectrum of the space radiation environment. It would be nearly impossible, especially at the GeV particles at the far end of the spectrum - and you need those, both to test for SEE susceptiblity, and to accurately evaluate the effects of High-Z shielding, which can often cause more damage by showering the protected components with secondary radiation produced by ultra high energy flux.

    And results obtained with accelerators and isotopes have to be analyzed to reveal the specific damage mechanism, and then those mechanisms modeled to predict what might happen in the space environment. This is by no means an exact science.

    Typically, for components used in highly critical applications, like manned space, all three types of tests are done, typically in order of expense.

  • In leiu of the visible light laser you could stick on an IR focused lamp that shows up REALLY nicely in all but the shittiest CCDs. Your night-vision goggles are going to pick up the lamp pretty well and gives you an advantage in a situation where you're better prepared than said opponent.
  • Just ask Australia.

  • Wow, where do I sign up? (Score:4)

    by sid_vicious ( 157798 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @12:19PM (#621398) Homepage Journal
    And my mom thought I was wasting away all those hours I spent playing "Missile Command" on my Atari 2600...

    You just wait until *I'm* put in charge of a nuclear death ray satellite. Momma would be so proud.

    :)

  • Probes ARE reprogrammable, the problem with the Mars probe that ate atmosphere was a miscalculation of an orbital trajectory. Having a server you could update to wouldn't solve shit if your math is wrong. An internet server on a decive with a very small range communication channel would be stupid. That sort of extra overhead wastes valuable processor cycles that could be better used for telemetry or fine motor control. Why would you need to "open-source" analytical readings? A few letters and what-not and you can get access to lots of information from various probes over the past 50 years for "independant analysis".
  • I was not saying that the full spectrum is represented during an accelerator measurement, but it can be adequately simulated. Many years of measurements have been pretty successfully validated.

    Depending upon the particles you are talking about, you can certainly get GeV energies...try going to GANIL, GSI, NSCL...true they are not GeV/amu, but you get 200 MeV/amu...which is pretty good.

    In terms of the high Z shielding, I would assume that you are talking about proton shielding? Typically High Z materials are used to shield out electrons. Heavy Ions cut through material like butter because they are so high energy (the same reason we see GCRs on Earth).

    Proton recoils from high-Z materials do not have much range, so many of them stop in the metallization layers above the device or quickly in the device, not providing enough electron hole pairs to accomplish much.

    You are right that it is not an EXACT science, but it is pretty close. Typically a measurement for a device would consist of the following:

    - Cross section versus energy measurements at a proton accelerator(s). It might be Crocker Nuclear Laboratory or Indiana University Cycltron Facility or Paul Scherrer Institute.

    - Proton total dose measurements at the same proton accelerators.

    - Cross section versus LET measurements at a heavy ion facility. It might be Brookhaven National Labs, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Texas A&M, National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, GANIL or GSI.

    With these measurement results, it is not difficult to make a pretty good assessment of the space environment response.

    This does depend on a couple key issues though:
    1) You have people making the measurements that know what they are doing. I can't tell you how important this is.

    2) The utilization of the device is pretty close to the space application.

    3) You don't cheap out. For instance, many people like to use Alpha sources to make a quick and dirty measurement...this is essentially useless in many instances. The range of the particles is short, there is an LET distribution...just plain bad. Also, people like to use Cobalt 60 gammas to make their total dose measurements; there are a number of devices where this will just not work: optocouplers, LEDs, solar cells etc that experience displacement damage effects and other devices where the reasons are not so clear...but the impact is quite clear. You must make measurements with the best simulation possible: if you are flying at LEO, then make proton measurement, if you are flying at MEO, then electron measurments (for total dose) may make more sense. While electrons and gammas are similar in many respects, there have been instances where deviations between electron and gamma response have been observed.

    Many people think 500 to 2000 an hour is expensive for the accelerator time, but they don't realize how expensive it would be if that critical component fails in space at a cost of $100s of millions of dollars.

    I guess the bottom line issue I had with your post are as follows:

    - Most radiation effects testing should NOT be done with isotopes and I like to think is not...the true numbers are anyone's guess because no one knows what measurements everyone in the area is making.

    - The second point is that it is not true that putting a space experiment up is cheaper or better. In terms of cost, a design and launch is very expensive; you would be lucky to get a trivial space experiment up on a satellite for under $100K.
    Also, they do NOT necessarily provide a good measurement. The sample size is very small (typically 1 or 2). The space environment conditions are very poorly known on a short time scale, so to be useful the mission must be for a long time (5 to 10 years, in which time the technology becomes out dated). You can make the conditions better known by putting dosimeters and particle detectors on board, but that raises the cost significantly. Finally, you will only know the results for one type of environment (in the case of STRV, a GTO/HEO type orbit). These results will not provide much use in terms of a LEO type orbit (the first or second most common type of orbit).

    The best use of a space experiment like this (and this is what STRV is somewhat about) is to make dosimetry and particle detector measurements (the (S)REM instrument is on board, I don't remember about the CREDO particle detector) in space in real-time with observations of device performance, and ALSO make ground measurements. This allows us to improve the modelling of these effects from ground measurements. This is not cheap, but it does advance the state of the art somewhat if done correctly.

    MPTB tried to do this, but really the results have been less than spectacular so far. The data is not as freely available as it was supposed to be and many of the researches are not looking at the data correctly. The data from the ELDRS experiment is a good example of that. The experiment was essentially a failure because it failed to prove ELDRS either way.

    If you are interested in continuing this discussion, you can email me at tempacc99@hotmail.com

  • The artical says it has a one year mission. I wonder how long it will last. History of satalites suggests either a 20 years (Pinoner or voyger anyone?), or a couple weeks. Barring liftoff disasters of course. Of course being in earth orbit does intorduce some drag, but even still many things have been in space longer then their designed mission.

  • If solar activity can knock out power to large sections of Canada ("The fifty-first state" indeed), then it would probably not take much to fry a delicate piece of electronics floating around without the atmosphere that protects us here. Maybe the satellite has special shielding or something, but there's enough wired connections down here on the ground that you can probably, for the most part, only use wireless to get a couple miles to the base station/cell tower/802.3 (# correct?) hub. Sure, if you're a l33t explorer in Antarctica or another place without dense-pack cell towers you might need a satellite, but not if you're in Calgary or New York.

    Tell me what makes you so afraid
    Of all those people you say you hate

  • This is better than Ultima Online! (Score:3)

    by Sentsix ( 128268 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @12:27PM (#621405) Homepage
    Instead of PK'ing people's avatars in a massively multiplayer game you'd get to destroy real satellites from the comfort of your home! Sure it'd probably cost more than $10 a month, but watching the fruits of your work streak through the upper atmosphere makes every penny worth it.

    The line for this starts behind me....

    Midwatch Industries

  • Re:A Telerobotic Future Is A Fun Future (Score:3)

    by bonzoesc ( 155812 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @12:30PM (#621406) Homepage
    Such a feedback loop would probably be a bad idea because it would be too easy to tamper with the client software on the ground to send the satellite bad data, such as "Something is at coordinates (x,y,z)", and the satellite turns its fragile camera straight at the sun. Quite frankly, I wouldn't trust script kiddies with a $2.5 billion dollar telescope in space.

    Tell me what makes you so afraid
    Of all those people you say you hate

  • More than just remote control via IP (Score:3)

    by code_rage ( 130128 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @12:58PM (#621407)
    I followed the link in the New Scientist story to the UK ministry web site [dera.gov.uk]. There is some great stuff there on all of the technology they are testing in the harsh GTO (geosynch transfer orbit) environment:
    - comm layers (CCSDS and a new jointly developed protocol for TT+C)
    - lots of sensor, battery, and PV technologies
    - and of course the rad-hard SPARC

    This is a great way to work on risk reduction for the next generation of cheapsats. Bravo!

  • pr0n in orbit (Score:4)

    by Gefiltefish ( 125066 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @12:30PM (#621408)
    Great! This is just fabulous.

    With internet servers going up in satellites, the next thing you know, the earth's orbit will be clouded with porn servers.

  • Re:Jurisdiction in Orbit? (Score:3)

    by rjh ( 40933 ) <rjh@sixdemonbag.org> on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @01:01PM (#621409)
    Short answer: nobody knows for sure. It'd probably fall under the same laws as marine vessels (maritime law). The sat would be considered the property of its owner, but the nation wouldn't be able to enforce its laws on the satellite, since the satellite is in international "waters" (well, international LEO).

    It's a well-established principle that nation-states can't enforce their laws on ships of foreign registry when those ships are in international waters. Doing so is considered an act of war (and was the cause of the War of 1812, if I recall).

    So, if you don't mind a really expensive porn server... talk to Seahaven and incorporate a business there. Then buy a sat server and have the Russians put it in orbit. Once it's in orbit, upload all the pr0n and MP3s you want and let the world download freely.

    Since Seahaven isn't signatory to any international conventions, Seahaven doesn't even recognize the existence of copyright (no copyright law + no signatory to the Berne Convention = no copyright). Any nation that wanted to put you on trial for making DeCSS available in defiance of court order would first have to declare war on Seahaven in order to do it. :)

  • Been there... (Score:3)

    by spellcheckur ( 253528 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @01:02PM (#621410)
    I actually did this myself six months ago with an Estes rocket with 700 "D" size boosters.

    I launched a pc-104 with a wireless modem and solar cells, streaming Elton John's "Rocket Man."

    I got a cease-and-desist order from the RIAA branch on Mars, but Iridium went belly up before I could fight the jurisdictional issues in court.

  • "Satellite 1, look in this direction." (it rotates to look at satellite 2)

    "Satellite 2, look in that direction." (it looks over there, which rotates a flat panel to reflect the Sun at satellite 1)

  • The satellites are up. What is much nicer is that that the AMSAT Phase 3D Amateur Radio Satellite that was riding the same booster is up, after years of waiting for a ride to space, and separation from the launch vehicle was successful. See the AMSAT web site [amsat.org] for more.

    Bruce

  • Re:Orbital Lasers (Score:5)

    by bonzoesc ( 155812 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @12:35PM (#621424) Homepage
    "Hooray! You got modded up to a 5. Here's the form field. Enter the coordinates of something you want to give a good healthy zap from orbit."

    Actually, it could be linked to the poll system:
    Who gets zapped?

    • Bill Gates
    • The head of the RIAA (name escapes me...)
    • Jack Valenti, in charge of MPAA (?)
    • CmdrTaco

    Clothe yourself in aluminum foil like Bart Simpson on Focusyn and you're safe.

    Tell me what makes you so afraid
    Of all those people you say you hate

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