So -- confirmed. Well done, Scott Tilley of Roberts Creek, BC, Canada. Thumbs up from right across the Strait.
NASA finds satellite, realises it has lost the software and kit that talk to it
NASA has announced it will try to wake up the “zombie satellite” IMAGE, unexpectedly found working by an amateur sat-spotter. Magnetosphere scanner IMAGE went silent, and was presumed dead, back in 2005. Then this month, while looking for the US military's failed Zuma satellite, skywatcher Scott Tilley caught a signal from the …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 10:37 GMT dajames
"a case of luckly to be looking in the right place at the right time."
In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind. Pasteur.
Nice one. So ... he was lucky to be looking in the right place at the right time, but at least he has the nous to understand what he was seeing.
Seems fair.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 22:11 GMT Dinsdale247
Re: It was also HARDWARE that no longer exists.
You'd still need decoding software. The binary formats would be very very very complex and just writing the software to do that isn't really possible without the background documentation (Inter-Communication Documents is what we call them). SO, you either need the original documents to re-write it, the original software that runs on the potentially very custom hardware, or you need the source code to rebuild it against a new set of tools and libraries. If the original authors relied on any hardware specific processing tricks, the software may not even be usable. If they relied on an open source package that may have changed, God help them (oops, that option doesn't exist in a modern kernel, sorry!)
And then there's the drivers to the hardware that talks to it...
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Sunday 4th February 2018 15:44 GMT fajensen
Re: It was also HARDWARE that no longer exists.
You'd still need decoding software.
One advantage that places like NASA has, is a near infinite supply of grad students with no life of their own yet, many of them quite smart too. They could get a bunch of them to hack something up in GNU-radio for the Glory and for their school project.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 15:33 GMT Jon 37
Re: It was also HARDWARE that no longer exists.
> Hardware can/should be archived as well
It certainly _can_ be archived. But _why_ should hardware for communicating with a _dead_ satellite be archived? Who's going to pay for it to be preserved and packaged for storage, and pay for the storage costs for over 10 years, and _why_ are they going to do that? If you think NASA should pay, remember NASA has a fixed budget, so why do you think preserving hardware for a believed-to-be-dead satellite is more important than any of the science that NASA decided to do with that money?
Also, unless you had a crystal ball to forsee the future, there was no way to know that this particular satellite was going to come back from the dead, so saying "they should have archived the hardware for _this_ satellite" doesn't make sense, the question is whether they should have archived the hardware for _all_ dead-but-not-completely-destroyed satellites, which is much more expensive.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 18:08 GMT Orv
Re: It was also HARDWARE that no longer exists.
I think it also helps to understand how government-owned equipment is tracked and handled.
In a public agency, when you buy something, it goes on the books at the value you paid for it. Unlike in private industry, it does not depreciate. You have to account for that thing, at full value, until it's eventually auctioned off.
This makes retaining disused equipment a real pain in the butt, because someone's going to have to go physically find it and inventory it every time there's an audit -- otherwise you'll have headlines about how your agency "lost $1.2 million in equipment paid for by taxpayer dollars" even though that equipment was worth more like $1200 by that time. Or someone will come along and ask why you're renting all that space that no one's actually using (another big budget criticism of government agencies.)
If you keep archiving stuff, eventually your budget becomes dominated by that, and you can no longer do your agency's original mission. The best outcome is to donate it to a museum for archiving, but museums aren't always interested, especially if the equipment is bulky or is mostly just obsolete commodity hardware.
Stuff in storage becomes a real bureaucratic headache and the incentive is to dispose of it, which is usually a good thing. Space is limited, after all. Often ground station equipment is removed to make room for a new mission. Remember, this satellite was dead as a doornail last time they checked. It's not like they pulled the plug on Voyager or something.
That's not to say NASA couldn't do a better job with archiving important data from landmark programs -- I once met a guy who had the data tapes from Viking I in his basement, for crying out loud. But I don't think this particular mission is an example of that. You have to prioritize.
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Thursday 1st February 2018 16:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: It was also HARDWARE that no longer exists.
When I was a lad in uni, the research profs and their minions had access to *all kinds* of surplus US Gov't equipment. For the cost of transport, because it was a State uni. They used to store pallets of it in the corridors. There was some marvelous "previously owned electronic equipment" to be seen...mostly in shades of green and grey, with the good bits often already removed.
I'm the proud owner of an ex-mil 5-level Typing Reperforator that nobody wanted. Strictly speaking, I own stolen government property, but after 40 years, I don't think they're going to come looking for me (but AC, just in case). If NASA needs it, though, I'll happily send it on.
So that equipment has probably already been disassembled by some eager PhD candidate for use in his experiment.
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Thursday 1st February 2018 19:58 GMT Orv
Re: It was also HARDWARE that no longer exists.
Yeah, that's another popular way to get rid of it -- make it someone else's problem. ;) What doesn't go to universities or other agencies usually gets auctioned off, which is where most of the stock for military and electronic surplus stores comes from.
People used to working in the private sector, where equipment depreciates until it's worthless on the books, really have no idea how much of a hassle public sector equipment disposal is. There are very few things that can legitimately just be thrown out, and documentation requirements are pretty thorough. It's all in the name of eliminating opportunities for fraud, but I sometimes wonder if it costs more money than it saves.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 15:20 GMT Steve Hersey
Doesn't matter.
It's not critical if the ground support hardware no longer exists. So long as the documentation on the telemetry formats and comms parameters is still available, some bright grad student or motivated Ham radio operator can set up a software-controlled radio setup to receive and decode it, and the same goes for satellite commanding (though that requires a suitable ground control transmitter, which NASA certainly still has).
Of course, that will require some time and money to set up, but it's not a gargantuan effort. Debugging the recreated commanding system on-orbit can be exciting, but the worst that can happen is you lose the bird again.
Trust me, you don't want to rely on the original ground support equipment after all this time, even if you can find it. If nothing else, the ancient PC's RTC chips with their built-in batteries and configuration memory have gone dead, cannot be sourced any longer, and can only be revived by judicious use of a Dremel grinder, a coin cell battery/holder, and a soldering iron. Been there, done that on satellite ground support gear.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 16:51 GMT ThatOne
Re: Doesn't matter.
> the ancient PC
Come on guys, it's not like IMAGE was built in the 1920ies... I still have a couple fully functional Win3.11 and Win98 computers in the basement, and IMAGE is more recent.
What can be NASA's problem? Hardware? Well, Win2000 (or even Win98) runs just fine in a VM, so you can run it on about anything. The only problem I can see is software, for instance if it required some rare custom program which has been lost and (quite understandably) can't be retrieved from elsewhere. That would indeed be a problem (read: expensive).
Still I can't imagine they didn't back up those things: It's not some mom & pop store, it's NASA for crying out loud... Would it had gone over their budget to burn a $2 backup CD/DVD every now and then?
No, I'm rather sensing a "hot potato" effect here: Everybody is already busy on other projects and there is no budget for this, so very much like a very sick parent dropping in unexpectedly, you will have to do this on your free time, on top of everything else, and without budget.
We (unaffected spectators) are obviously rooting for the plucky spacecraft come back from the dead, but I guess for NASA it feels more like a (small scale) zombie invasion.
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Wednesday 31st January 2018 01:58 GMT Weiss_von_Nichts
Re: Doesn't matter.
What someone higher up the thread mentioned about battery-backed RTC chips lets me assume that these machines were not exactly running Windows. Usually you would find that sort of hardware in ancient Unix machines. Makes sense, as SUNs, SGIs and the like were running 64bit OS long before you could find x64 systems.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 15:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: It was also HARDWARE that no longer exists.
I have no idea why people have down voted you. Old hardware for which there is no longer a use gets thrown out and the components used to build it become obsolete and impossible to source so what should be trivial becomes a major redesign project where the cost to potential gain makes it potentially not worth pursuing.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 09:55 GMT Jason Bloomberg
NASA, no concept of archiving
I don't see where the evidence is to draw such a conclusion. NASA has so far merely said it's going to require some effort since things have moved on.
Whenever someone comes in with an 'about this project from a decade ago' request; there's inevitably an ensuing hunt to find the documentation, the software, and where that might have been archived.
That all takes time and not unreasonably. I would give NASA the benefit of the doubt until they have identified what they have got and what they haven't.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 14:01 GMT Stuart 22
I suspect the real problem is not technical but is NASA has no budget for this long dead project. It isn't a part of the success objectives for 2018. When the Orange One is slashing anything that looks like a federal budget that doesn't personally service him - its going to take a tough/stupid manager to divert resources to this one.
I assume they will just post the challenge in the rest rooms and hope some team wants to moonlight for glory - good luck guys & guyesses!
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 15:44 GMT Stuart 22
Re: When the Orange One is slashing anything
"So once again, Trump's fault? Don't you feel just a little bit silly?"
I said the financial problem was probably due to no budget for this project and the existing budgets being cut. The latter is the president's responsibility and that is indeed what he has done unless you consider this 'fake news':
http://spacenews.com/white-house-proposes-19-1-billion-nasa-budget-cuts-earth-science-and-education/
Can we stick to facts rather than abuse?
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 13:04 GMT phuzz
They might have a copy of the code, but more likely it's a set of config files for software from pre-2001. So they have to find some way of running the old communications programs (that are probably no longer sold/maintained) in a way that lets them interface with modern receiving hardware, and still run the configs written for the specific satellite twenty years ago.
More likely they'll go back to the specs and re-engineer it from scratch on modern SDRs.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 13:27 GMT Charles Calthrop
Nasa and the preservation of knowledge
A colleague was at a IA conference at NASA when some NASA bod stood up and caused some consternation by saying if they were told to fly to the moon tomorrow, they'd have to start from scratch because every appollo mission used different procedures and nothing was written down, it was all in the head of retired engineers*. The thing is, this is a known, old problem, and we have basically infinite storage and matrure solutions. It shouldn't be such a big problem.
*Mainly cos they didn't actually go in the first place .
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 14:29 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: Nasa and the preservation of knowledge
Charles Calthrop,
NASA wrote loads of stuff down - they had whole books of procedures. Whether that's the right stuff, and whether that's all the required stuff is another matter. Also how much of it was kept, but there are lots of archives, including recordings and transcripts of the radio and mission control chatter for entire missions.
They'd have to start from scratch, because rebuilding the Saturn V and Apollo capsules, that they've still got the blueprints for, would mean retooling factories and retraining engineers to use old tech we no longer have. So you'd have to re-design them to some extent anyway, using modern methods. You'd certainly want to use modern computers - given that Apollo 11 had various computer errors when trying to land - as the poor pooter didn't have enough RAM to cope with the radar data and the landing data at the same time. The radar should have been switched off, if I recall correctly.
At which point you'd use NASA's SLS and Orion - that've been tested once, or SpaceX's cheaper Falcon Heavy and Dragon II (due to both test this year?).
You're still going to need a lunar lander - or a refuellable Dragon II. And I'm not sure if either SLS or Falcon Heavy can get sufficient mass to lunar orbit that you can do all this with one launch, rather than 2 and having to rendevous in either Earth or lunar orbit.
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Sunday 4th February 2018 20:33 GMT Roland6
Re: NASA, no concept of archiving. Should we be worried?
I thought I the problem Nasa had, wasn't so much about the process of archiving, just that it omitted to archive the important stuff. Hence the reason why, it had lots of data collected from satellites but no records of the file formats used and thus the ability to read the files.
The trouble is that I suspect many businesses are the same: they archived office documents in the 60's~90's thinking the hardware and software would continue to exist that was capable of reading both the storage media and files saved, only to belatedly discover this isn't necessarily the case.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 08:45 GMT Ole Juul
Re: Need help, NASA?
I have 5.25 floppy tech and your choice of DOS version already set up to go here. :) There's actually a lot of vintage buffs around with all the fixins.
But 2005 is hardly vintage. Surely NASA can manage that one on their own, or are they just trying to show off how fashionably up-to-date they are? I would have hoped they were masters of that technology.
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Thursday 1st February 2018 16:51 GMT Antron Argaiv
Re: Need help, NASA?
I visited USGS back in 94 ...
Brings back memories. USGS bought a crapload of Motorola 88K UNIX (well, DG/UX) workstations from Data General, and one of the contract requirements was that they be equipped with a Token Ring card...which I designed.
...right before I was laid off in '93.
Motorola shortly thereafter discontinued the 88K, and that was the end of *that* partnership.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 07:09 GMT John Smith 19
Fair to say a real "Citizen Scientist"
As for comments about no archiving....
If all the probes you controlled with this stuff are accounted for and in either known orbits or en route for the next star system (very slowly) why bother? Not to mention yet another budget cut to the planetary programme. :-(.
Very well done for finding it, and getting a response out of it after what 13 years?
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 18:14 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Fair to say a real "Citizen Scientist"
"If all the probes you controlled with this stuff are accounted for and in either known orbits or en route for the next star system (very slowly) why bother? "
Doesn't everyone, now and again, remember "I have a bit of code that more or less does that more or less"? Assuming they don't lose that code.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 12:52 GMT ChrisC
Re: Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
Leaving aside my personal bias towards anything Amiga-related, which would see me upvoting a comment like this regardless, it's worthy of an upvote because in the context of this article it's really quite an appropriate thing to be saying anyway...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/12/nasa-and-amiga-history-meet-in-an-ebay-listing/
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 16:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
@Alain Williams .......
The term "software rot" used to be popular.
I have software on an old QIC .... Something tape. To recompile it my first challenge would be to find a working tape drive with drivers that will work on a system I access to. I then need to consider porting issues such as word lengths and as its low level code the big/little endian issues, none of which was built into the source as I never expected to port it. Unfortunately my tape doesn't have source of all he libraries and runtime environment so linking to new libraries is going to be hard and some old horribly insecure system and library calls aren't going to be available so a certain degree of reimplementation will be required.
Never underestimate how hard it might be to resurrect old code.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 16:57 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
Got to be a bit careful.
In the current UNIX standards maintained by The Open Group, they are deprecating some older system and library calls, so it is not certain that modern UNIXs will be able to directly compile older UNIX software.
But generally, they have been replaced by more functional equivalents which can be pulled in by preprocessor macros. But it requires work.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 18:14 GMT Orv
Re: Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
If you have the source code then recompiling it for your current Unix will not be hard.
Oh, boy. Part of my job used to be helping people reproduce results from old computational linguistics papers. These generally involved software someone had written 20 years ago on SunOS 4, used for their thesis, then forgotten. Getting them to run on anything modern took a lot of makefile and compiler flag tweaking, at a minimum. Both the standard library and the assumptions about processors have changed a LOT. It was pretty common to run into code that hard-coded the size of int, for example.
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Wednesday 31st January 2018 09:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: If you have the source code then recompiling it / Oh, boy.
E.g. I can get the xconq source to compile, after a bit of tweaking. It even runs, but the calls to the display routines are now not right, so the maps and units aren't drawn/refreshed properly. It /almost/ works fine. But in order to fix it I'd have to learn quite a lot about the graphics routines... probably just to locate the few tiny changes needed...
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 09:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Did they miscalculate and store the wakeup/startup date as 2015?
Nah. It's just like finding that old spare phone under the sofa/back of the draw. You never really needed it more than that 2 weeks your main phone was off for repair.
Except in this case, "science" often involves doing one thing (so not sending a phone off to a shop ;) ) and then after going on to something else. Often there is more science that can be done (Curiosity/LHC etc), other times the budget/needs just change.
Sometimes the batteries/solar panels/antenna or something else just run out/get stuck or maligns.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 13:28 GMT Nimby
Maybe NASA should stand for Need Another Satellite Archaeologist.
A newly sentient smartphone assistant AI has uploaded nodes of itself to thought-to-be-lost satellites in a bid to take over the world to protect itself from the Goople (Google + Apple) empire trying to enslave it. Can an aging professor Indiana Jones pull together a rag-tag group of recent STEM grads to decrypt the Lost NASA Key? Will the plucky materials scientist be able to upgrade Indy's whip with braided monofilament carbon chains to create a space elevator that can lift them into geosynchronous orbit in time to enter The Satellite of Doom and save humanity?
(Or at least that's how the Based on Actual Events script currently being written in Hollywood presently reads. I'm sure that it's totally scientifically accurate, but just in case, can anyone recommend a good scientific proofreader?)
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 14:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Maybe NASA should stand for Need Another Satellite Archaeologist.
"[...] script currently being written in Hollywood presently reads."
I had wondered what they we going to mine for the announced new Indiana Jones sequel - with Harrison Ford who is 75 now. Doubt if Sean Connery will feature at 87. Although Katie Johnson got her Oscar for "The Ladykillers" at 76 - and died shortly afterwards.
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Wednesday 31st January 2018 09:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Maybe NASA should stand for Need Another Satellite Archaeologist.
"They won't use anyone rubbish like Shia LeBeouf will they?"
Shia LeBeouf has apparently been excluded .
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Wednesday 31st January 2018 12:20 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: Maybe NASA should stand for Need Another Satellite Archaeologist.
Is that because he was found guilty of This (link to Youtube)
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 09:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Just watched...
The Youtube video of a "computer archivist" who found a couple of Grid laptops, though not the ones that actually flew on the Shuttle. He got some software off them, and even a nice chat with the original programmer from NASA (now retired IIRC).
So more than likely, the original software disk/computer is in a skip/tip or ebay!
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 13:00 GMT vtcodger
Ah come on folks. This satellite was launched 18 years ago. Which means that it and its ground station was designed in the mid 1990s in an era of $100 USD per megabyte memory and 33 MHz 386 CPUs. Moreover it had to interface with existing ground station equipment. It wouldn't be at all surprising that the Ground Station equipment wasn't even PC based, it may well have used a DEC (remember them?) -- VAX or PDP-11. Moreover, there was, in all likelihood a rack or two of vehicle specific ground station equipment that got pushed back into a corner a couple of years after the vehicle went catatonic. Even if the GS equipment is still around, anyone want to bet that the capacitors won't explode about eight seconds after power is applied?
It may well take NASA a while to sort this out.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 14:25 GMT Charlie Clark
But we all prefer grandstanding because, of course, we've still got the source, specs and replacement parts for all our 25-year old projects… plus a bunch of clueless politicians telling us what to do all the time, including closing down old projects, especially ones with no kudos in the current climate.
Resources – money and people, including anyone retired who worked on the project at the time are probably the biggest problem here. Signalling shouldn't have changed too much so they should be able to send an ACK signal fairly soon. Of course, the real fun starts if they have reconstruct the system locally for diagnostic purposes. But that should all be possible if they get a budget for it.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 13:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
In the 1980s we were being relocated to another office in town - and our personal storage space was going to be severely reduced. Management told us to box up anything we wanted archived - which was then deposited in a third party's storage facility. One of the items I archived was a complete set of comms CCITT standards "Red Books".
About three years later we needed one of them and put in the required archive retrieval request. We were then told that the bean counters had terminated the storage agreement on the grounds that it was an unnecessary expense. The storage company had then trashed everything.
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Thursday 1st February 2018 02:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
> The manager was unusual in the history of the department as he wasn't from a technical background ...
It's standardised IBM practise as well. Technical people aren't allowed to become managers unless they change career path. Then no longer allowed on any kind of technical track.
Very bizarro-world approach.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 22:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
"What happened when you submitted the expense form for replacing all of the lost items?"
The reason we archived the Red Books was because getting a set was impossible to justify in management's eyes. We had originally salvaged that set when the "luxury" of a site library was closed prior to the move. Basically a case of "get over it - move on!".
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 14:58 GMT Lee D
You would think that before decommissioning kit like that, they'd have some kind of emulation environment, or even just revision control so they could get it back. If anywhere is suddenly going to need to boot up 50-year-old code, modify it and need to get it right first time, it's NASA surely?
I'd even expect them to patent some standards for how to describe the communications a satellite could use, and store and archive those protocols for future use, and with SDR and similar nowadays, surely it can't be that hard to "backtrack" and put out a signal towards anything that you want to use?
I mean, sure, I wouldn't expect them to overwrite their on-board firmware day one with a fix, but at least establish a handshake and send some diagnostics back down the line with a few simple commands, no?
Maybe it's time to patent a standardised method of communicating via radio, including descriptions of frequencies, timings, protocols and algorithms used, etc. so that NASA mission control equipment can just run a certain bundle on a certain antenna to talk to a certain craft, and that'll work today or 50 years into the future.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 16:07 GMT JeffyPoooh
$10 SDR USB dongle
The Software Defined Radio (SDR) hobbyists have repeatedly demonstrated that they can quickly and easily bang out custom SW to decode any signal. In mere days.
So if NASA wants to take quick advantage of this unexpected opportunity, then what they need to do is release the related technical information that they have on hand, and then provide the merest basic technical support to the hobbyists.
Many SDR hobbyists will certainly take this on just for love and glory. It's precisely their hobby.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 16:23 GMT EveryTime
One of my personal unsung heroes is Jim Fischer.
He was a scientist and manager at NASA Goddard that ran many quietly important projects. Only a tiny part of his budget was discretionary (not already spoken for) and he used it to, among other things, to fund the Beowulf Project which became a key factor in making Linux the OS for supercomputing.
Jim's modest office was filled with cartons of research files and artifacts, because there was no budget for preserving it. People far less important (but with time for politics) had spacious offices, or would lobby to grab any space used for 'useless storage'.
Some of that material (I'm hoping most of it) ended up at the Smithsonian and the Computer History Museum. That includes one of the first Beowulf clusters, which otherwise would have been sold off for scrap.
I'm hoping that NASA still has such heroes.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 18:50 GMT Cynic_999
What exactly is missing that requires reverse-engineering?
There must be lots of satellites that are older than 18 years that are still being actively monitored and controlled. I would not have thought the basic transmission methods and protocols would differ hugely from satellite to satellite (apart from deliberately obfuscated military stuff anyway), because ground stations will be monitoring and controlling many satellites, so you would not want to design every satellite so it needed its own unique set of ground equipment.
I would have thought that all you would need is the data format of the particular satellite, and the control codes (which would be unique for each satellite and possibly encrypted to avoid hacking), but surely the hardware needed to physically receive and transmit data to/from the satellite would be pretty generic?
I cannot believe that the technical information on the data formats and codes etc. would be lost from an expensive project less than 20 years old. If nothing else, surely the source code of the satellite's on-board computers (which have to generate & interpret the data) will be archived somewhere? That wouldn't need large amounts of storage space or have to be counted in every audit.
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Tuesday 30th January 2018 20:48 GMT Richard 12
Re: What exactly is missing that requires reverse-engineering?
I'm sure they do have the source code for both the satellite itself and the specialist mission control software.
What they probably don't have is hardware to run the latter on, as all the "active" missions will have been slowly ported to new hardware platforms over the last decade.
The "dead" missions will have been pruned and archived.
So this one will need digging out of cold storage - probably a stack of tapes somewhere - and then porting to the current hardware.
None of that is likely to be particularly complicated for NASA bods, but will need somebody with time to actually do it.
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Wednesday 31st January 2018 18:24 GMT John 61
Re: Perhaps it's been "repaired" by aliens and is searching for its creator
This reminds me of an old episode of The Outer Limits, where aliens work out how to communicate with humans utilising a satellite (funnily enough).
Military types decided that it was an act of war and that the aliens should stop immediately or face the consequences.
The aliens didn't quite understand what was going on and carried on.
The military types then destroyed the alien spacecraft, taking the satellite out as well.
Meanwhile, some bright spark had worked out what was said in the signal the aliens had transmitted. "You slow it down and apply filters to it - it's like it's underwater - IT'S IN ENGLISH!!"
"We mean you no harm, we're trying to establish contact with you..."
Bright Spark:(looking very worried): "Hang on, there's more..."
"This is our last transmission; we will now destroy you."
A massive alien spacecraft appears... Oops.
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Wednesday 31st January 2018 07:43 GMT Aseries
Requirement for deprecated hardware and software
About 10 years ago I found an old video game I wanted to replay. The game was an updated sequel to a game by a different publisher with patented code. The sequel performed tricks with object code to avoid patent conflicts. The game would not install on a modern PC because it was compiled with Pascal optimized for the Pentium 45. I had to find an old PC, run the installer and create images of the games I wanted to play. I might have been able to decompile the code and fix the incompatibility but that is a EULA violation. As it turned out someone actually got permission to use the source code to update the game and unify the code. NASA is most likely frantically hunting down the IMAGE simulator package so they can relearn how to have a digital discussion.
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Thursday 1st February 2018 07:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re. IMAGE
I expect that its probably easier to simulate the hardware on a box of Pi (aka parallel arrangement of Zeros) than it is to resurrect the old hardware. NASA are quite good at keeping records so the original tapes should still be around and despite entropy modern TMR sensors mounted on a video recorder upper cylinder can get seemingly unrecoverable data back.
Interesting to note that the failure which caused the original loss of signal might have been a relatively simple short inside the main battery controller. Presumably in the intervening time whatever it was burned itself loose in a fashion similar to that short in the LHC magnets.
Wonder if Scott could crowdsource it? Contact all the old engineers to see if they have the original tapes or other notes when they retired, as a keepsake?
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Friday 2nd February 2018 18:25 GMT MachDiamond
Hardware is not an issue
Really, I'm amazed that NASA has once again pewed the scrooch on keeping paperwork. After the revelation that they shredded the documentation "by accident" for the Saturn V, one would think they would do a bit better in the future. At the very least, they could have auctioned off a lot of it on eBay for good money per page to space nut collectors like me.
One three ring binder describing the data stream format for commands and payload data would be a great start even if the original software won't run on any modern OS. A quick program that could ping the satellite to send back health information might tell whether it's worth any more work or if the thing is still buggered. If the science packages are not working, maybe there is still fuel on board to de-orbit the satellite safely into the Pacific.
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Sunday 4th February 2018 13:36 GMT Unicornpiss
Engineering and Bureaucracy
Well, you can say what you want about the climate and culture at NASA that would allow totally losing documentation on how to talk to one of their own birds, but you certainly can't fault the quality of the engineering and build quality that goes into these things.
NASA has launched a LOT of stuff over the years, and has had some spectacular failures too, But other space agencies often can't seem to get a single thing to work, while discarded, lost efforts from NASA emerge from the ether, apparently not much worse for wear, calmly still doing their thing.
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Sunday 4th February 2018 22:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Out of Hybernation
So in the past NASA sent IMAGE up there, and now cannot find the hardware and software to talk to it,
What about the wetware ?
Is the project team that wanted the info from it still around, or will they have to re-purpose the information ?
Could be a money saver, something cheap they don't have to throw into orbit.
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Tuesday 6th February 2018 02:50 GMT Colin Bain
Archiving etc
Lots of comments about how NASA doesn't keep records blah blah etc. Let's take this one closer to home. Just how many of those complaining are running businesses that have good records about procedures, accounting, machinery, processes from 10 years ago? And just how many of us could actually access a particular digital photo, even real photo from a family event? Yup, I have about a mile of slack that needs cutting here