Boffins fix dead satellite using 'dirty hack' in space Engineers and ground controllers at the European Space Agency are overjoyed to announce that they have managed to bring an unexpectedly defunct, critical science satellite orbiting the Earth back to life – by hacking it. Graphic depicting the Cluster satellite constellation in action. Credit: ESA Forget user logins, this is …
NASA launched a satellite that was turned off, and the "on" button was on the side of the satellite; they had to retrieve it using the shuttle to turn it on!
*Some poetic license employed to make this appear funnier than it really was (the switch was supposed to operate as the satellite separated from it's launcher, but didn't)
"Its like how NASA spent $10M (or whatever it was) to get a pen to work is space... whereas the Russians used a pencil!"
You're close, but off on a few small details The "Fisher Space Pen" was developed independently and then sold to NASA for the staggering cost of $1.98 a piece. American astronauts used to carry pencils with them but eventually realized that filling their space capsules with conductive and easily broken graphite sticks wrapped up in flammable wood wasn't as good an idea as they had originally imagined.
The Russian solution wasn't to use a pencil, it was to carry grease pencils for writing on plastic sheets. By 1969 they switched to buying the same Fisher Space Pen that their American counterparts did.
So to correct your little anecdote, "Its like how NASA spent about two dollars for a commercial pen that could write in space... whereas the Russians imported exactly the same pen."
Not quite as punchy, but it does have the advantage of having more than a passing acquaintance with what actually happened.
"Its like how NASA spent $10M (or whatever it was) to get a pen to work is space... whereas the Russians used a pencil!"
This, again, FFS...? This has been debunked so many times -- even here in el Reg's comments pages, even an AC should have learned it by now.
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
Like the Russians, NASA used pencils before inventor Paul Fisher presented them with his privately-funded and designed pressurized pen for consideration. Like the Americans, the Russian space program bought and still currently uses Fisher's pen.
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin also, reportedly, confirmed to author Spider Robinson at a conference once, the rumor that a Fisher pen was used to fire the main liftoff engines for the Apollo 11 Lunar Module when the original toggle switch got broken off while he and Neil Armstrong were removing their bulky EVA packs in the cramped crew compartment -- a task that would likely have been impossible with a pencil.
They had a super management who, judging by their pay-off, basically wasn't at fault for reality being different to their vision and company went into a nose dive trying to ride telecoms bubble (or something like that anyway)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2746437/Marconi-cuts-debt-by-300m.html
"Warhaut and his fellow satellite experts feared that there had been a paralysing short circuit aboard the spacecraft, but managed to use a piece of dormant software in its computers to find out that in fact all five power switches on the WEC had locked closed – a condition that was considered unrecoverable according to the manual. The satellite simply was not supposed to be able to come back from that situation."
A human might not NEED a vestigial tailbone, but an unconscious one might be quickly roused (waken up, not gotten up, hehehe) by it being zapped with a few bolts or volts... (the overly KINKY humans might be STABBED or severed or savaged by one)... So much
But, calling this a dirty hack makes it sound like dirty, pointless code fragments were not removed and were not "how tos", hehehe
It won't be long before they are picked up, have all their computers confiscated, and are questioned for hours on end for violating some law. Don't worry they'll be released because the prosecutor will figure out he doesn't have jurisdiction in space but it might take a year to get the computers back.
I assume they wont hand over the details of the "dirty hack" because it would involve revealing that the login user-name and password were admin & admin and someone change it, forgetting to write it on the post it note stuck to the side of the monitor. so they had to use a copy of backtrack to hack it....
"Dirty hack" seems to refer to anything that isn't in the book of standard procedures. The guys who wrote the book of procedures wrote a new procedure to cope with an unforeseen situation and tested it on one of the other spacecraft. It's not rocket science - because that's the work of the Launcher guys!
They used a redundant holographic emitter boosted through the deflector array to deliberately misalign the EPS manifold and cause a warp-core overload, which automatically shut down the reactor, at which point the power couplings disengaged and the system was reset by the secondary command processor in a bio-neural gel pack.
Obviously.
Pfft.
This all sounds more than a little "iffy" to me -
do they actually mean the power switches were locked "open" and not "closed" since that would then be in the "off" state? The ESA article mentions "the WEC package on Cluster's number 3 satellite, Samba, failed to switch on".
Then if the power was off:
"all five power switches on the WEC had locked closed" (open) then how exactly was this piece of "dormant software" executed to miraculously turn the power back on?
"the on button is in space and there is no way to reach it! "
TFC to the designer of that little piece of brilliance; maybe it was 'stylistically and artistically correct' to put an on/off switch with no failsafe somewhere slightly inaccessible... I'm sure Apple would!
Yay for the hackers who are always the ones to fix problems in the end!
Beer! And plenty of it!
"Hacking" is fiddling about with people[0] and hardware[1], trying to make it do what it wasn't intended to do. Hacks that work are good hacks[2], hacks that don't work[3] need refinement.
Details on the sat-restart hack, please? The curiosity bug is strong around here.
[0] I won't get into social engineering here ... too many bugs for a couple paragraphs ;-)
[1] There is no such thing as "software" ... software is merely the current state of the hardware.
[2] My 3.5L/215ci Buick powered 1972 Datsun 510 is a "good hack".
[3] Government here in the USofA needs refinement ...
Under the erratic glow from the wind-powered monitor screens, everything looks like a 1980's disco in Zagreb with a candle in a shoebox for a strobelight. Two nightshift operators are surfing Anonymous Ethiopia and Justin Beiber's Facebook page respectively.
Goon 1 - "Apparently Anon have just declared open season on Oxfam. They're claiming some child trafficking and arms money laundering deal where Oxfam have been trading Land Cruisers for AK47s, kids and soap.
Goon 2 - "Everyone knows Anon is a CIA funded op. Looks like someone is getting burned. Toyota was the spooks company car of choice and like they say, "We don't forgive. "We don't forget". <Both LOL>
Goon 2 - But What the fuck do Oxfam want with AK47's? …
Goon 1 - It doesn't say, perhaps it's a smoke screen for the 4x4s. You know, with the number of arms shipments these days what's one more container of small arms? But a ship load of brand new Land Cruisers, well. That's bound to get some Somali pirates' attention.
<Short silence while Goon 2 ignores the fact that non of the above made any sense>
Goon 2 - It says here Beiber has brought out a new shade of nail varnish. I'm guessing that last batch was contaminated when the last round of HARRP instigated Pacific Rim earthquakes disrupted the varnish response frequency. It's like the Recco avalanche detectors only for mini-skirted jail bait.
<Sound of a Submarine Klaxxon accompanies a barely visible red icon on the large plasma that says Defcon 1>
Goon 1 - <High pitched Harry Secombe silly voice> "The satellite is down!"
Goon 2 - <Rimmer - Red Dwarf voice> "Aliens." "Aliens or a virus, it's always Aliens or a virus"
Goon 1 - "The last time you said that it was 'cause you couldn't get a GPS signal in the basement…
Goon 2 - "Aliens or virus or Anonymous…or Lulzsec. Or the NSA"
Goon 1 - "You left out MI6, GCHQ and CESG"
Goon 2 - "No I didn't. That lot are too busy watching Nigella box-sets and dribbling down their OTP sheets." <Breathless Nigella voice> "Dust the semtex over the cupcakes for a surprise he won't forget. Cherries are optional" <Sexy cherry filled pout mime to imaginary camera>
Still Goon 2 - "That's it! I just need to modify the cupcake recipe so my GPS will work in basements."
Goon 1 - "You're so full of it…
Goon 2 - "No seriously. It's dependant on cake decorations from China of course, particularly those little silver ball things." "It's the high heavy metal content that makes it possible for AWACs to track al-Qaeda in bunkers" ..."God knows what will be possible with Japanese baking products."
Goon 1 - "I quite like those ball things. I feel like a pinball wizard, pushing them around with my tongue" <starts singing> "How do you think he does it?"
Goon 2 - "What the fuck were we talking about?"
<…Long pause..>
Goon 1 - "The SAMBA satellite service is down!"
Goon 2 - "But GIMP, ToR and BACKTRACK are OK? Right, fire-up the Quattro and launch db_autopwn via the ToR end-point over Haiwai. There'll be no HARRP interference as the Bilderburg group are having their Bang-a-Hulu Con there this weekend.
Goon 1 - "2 sessions but it's waiting to finish. I think it's hung"
Goon 2 - HD Moore, another CIA stooge! Fuck it, switch to the GIMP!"
Goon 1 - <Dead Parrot Sketch Palin voice> But the Gimp's sleeping. He's dormant!"
Goon 2 - <DedZed> "Well then, I guess your just going to have to wake him now aren't you?"
<The GIMP process had been suspended after the photo manipulation of Bin Laden's "assassination" debacle.>
Goon 1 - <Dr Frankenstein - Gene Wilder Version> "It's alive!"
Goon 2 - "Great, now bring up those CCTV images of Dominique Strauss-Kahn"
Goon 1 - "The one's where he's buggering the maid or the… other ones?"
Goon 2 - <Ominously> "The other ones"
<Uncensored images of DSK mounting a hog-tied Justin Beiber while a pig in a maid's outfit looks on appear on the plasma screen>
Goon 2 - Right, add in Bin Laden and Obama then add it to Fox News' hacked tweet account.
Goon 1 - Done! How's this going to help again?
Goon 2 - The resulting surge of internet traffic will start a net one-way electron-flow causing the earth's polarity to flip.
Goon 1 - Right, and how's that going to help.
Goon 2 - <sigh> It won't, but we'll blame the resulting DDoS on Lulzsec.
Goon 1 - "Riiight… and SAMBA?"
Goon 2 - oh yeah, I nearly forgot. Use the GIMP's backdoor to tunnel a session across to the SAMBA satellite.
Goon 1 - "and then?"
Goon 2 - "upload GreaseMonkey and use the 'request some more print toner' script. Samba is configured to shutdown when no-one is printing."
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
