Its a pretty noble mission. I wonder what the salvage rights are. Which is to say if NASA abandons a spacecraft, and you bring it back into service, are you now the owner of it and its data? Would the original science team be able to tell you what to do with it? Even if you didn't want to?
That said, I was really disappointed that the dish antennas were dismantled at Onizuka AFB [1] (aka the 'blue cube') they were originally part of a group of space craft communication satellites and could even track things in LEO (fun to watch a giant dish following a satellite)
Now, who wants to join me in trying to talk to Britain's only self-launched (i.e. launched with our own rocket) satellite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospero_(satellite)? Most of the documentation is in the National Archive (I have copies).
That's extremely interesting. The frequency band is well within what you could do with fairly simple gear. Assuming it is still alive just reaching it would already be quite something, getting some useful readings from it would be absolutely awesome.
This may be something where talking to the HAM community will be more productive than talking to the hacker community, the first step would be to reliably track it using an antenna suitable for the frequency range and checking if it is emitting anything at all before attempts to contact it would make much sense (once you have a signal to home in on it is a lot easier to prod it rather than to prod blindly until something responds).
Keep in mind that this frequency band is not exactly unlicensed territory, you're smack in the mobile aeronautical band according to ofcom. So listening is likely ok but you may need a permit to transmit at that frequency and it is not necessarily the same frequency at which the satellite will receive it's input (typically it is some other frequency to enable full-duplex).
The amateur and academic radio astronomy community may have suitable antennas. Do HAM radio operators use dishes? I thought they use mainly vertical/dipole setups?
Sure they do. In fact, the microwave band was used for the longest time by HAMs because there was no known application for it, they pretty much pioneered it and dishes were the antennas of choice for those frequencies.
Doing a 1/4 wave trackable parabolic dish for something a little under 3m wavelength is very much achievable (and is not even close to microwave frequencies, 3m is huge!). If you want better efficiency you could use a larger dish but I think that it would be easier to up the power on the transmitter than it would be to make a dish 4 times that surface that rigidly tracks an object in LEO. That's quite the little bit of hardware engineering you'd have to do there. Even a few degrees 'off' would likely ruin the signal so precision is key and a large dish catches a lot of wind.
Assuming you're serious, what kind of equipment and knowledge would be needed?
According to the wiki page a team at UCL was planning to try, but the link to Roger Duthie's blog is dead. Any idea if they achieved anything?
Update:
Missing blog post content is at [1], courtesy of archive.org. Looks like they built some comms hardware. The full series of posts relating to Prospero is at [2]. Interesting read.
How much money do you think you need? A few private donations level or kickstarter level?
Consider just raising some prize money and then announcing a race for the first group to have confirmed contact with the satellite, and get out of the way?
Ok, consider yourself funded for 250 pounds, who else would like to chip in?
I'm really really rusty on VHF, do not have any required licenses and all my HAM contacts have dried up due to old age so that's pretty much all I think I can help with. The most I did in hardware terms in the last 6 months was to make an old Unitra grammophone work again, not quite in the right league :).
Mail me your IBAN please and I'll wire you the money, maybe do an official call-out for this project on your blog? That might get you some more help and/or funding. I really hope that you get this done, beware that there are a number of other satellites transmitting on the exact same frequency.
And a suitable radio set for 'stage 1' (find the thing), and then a suitable transmitter and some modem (probably doable using a SDR or even an audio card connected to the transceiver) to actually talk to it.
I have to agree with you about the Black Arrow - here in the museum in Liverpool is one of the Black Knight rockets which were the test vehicles the Black Arrow was based on. I think the design of the Black Knight is even more fantastical, it intrigued ever me since I went to the museum as a child.
Hmm, sounds like he heard something on 148.000 MHz which seems to be its control frequency. Nope, he didn't send any commands. I wonder if sending commands without permission would violate some treaty or law.
There is none. This spacecraft doesn't even have an onboard computer. The only reason people don't routinely hack spacecrafts like this is because you need a worldwide network of huge dish antennas to communicate with it. Right now, outside of the Deep Space Network, only the Aricebo dish is capable of transmitting to it. Once it gets closer to earth (within a few million miles), the 20 meter dish at Moorehead in Kentucky will be used.
Using a Capt. Crunch whistle, you could recreate the tones telcoms used to initiate long distance calling. Meaning you could blow the whistle and get free long distance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Draper
It's a reference back to John Draper's work on the blue box. You could trick AT&T pay phones into thinking you had deposited money by playing tones which were reproducible on toys that came out of Captain Crunch boxes.
In the early early days of telephone hacking (phone phreaking) a guy named John Draper discovered that the toy whistle found in a box of Cap'n Crunch cereal would emit a tone at precisely 2600 Hz. This frequency was used by The Bell System to issue call routing instructions. With it, you could make free long-distance calls around the world. Some via satellite.
It appears there are not very many objects currently at L1 [0]. L1 is an unstable Lagrange point, so satellites located "at" L1 generally orbit around the L1 point in a Lissajous Orbit [1]. Given that, I suspect more satellites can be put in these types of orbits around L1 than would "fit" at L1 in a more stationary configuration.
People have possibly been hacking 'space objects' for well over two decades, but (understandably) not much of that is in cited journals. The most you hear about it is that someone knows someone who knows someone that did something, in very rare cases the someone that did something even has a name.
That's not exactly verification, but there is so much smoke around this subject it would be hard to imagine there are no sparks or even a small fire.
Hacking a space borne piece of hardware that is in active use is probably an excellent way to become a 'person of interest' for a ton of agencies that you want no interaction with whatsoever. If you see an E2 flying in your neighbourhood while you're doing this it might be time to start packing.
The 400W transmitter is doable, the large parabolic antenna would be a bit harder to hide. Though, as you up the power you can use a smaller antenna. The giveaway then becomes fried birds falling out of the sky.
You're going 'up' with a highly directional antenna, and you're going to be transmitting very short bursts. The biggest risk will be the lobes projecting from the antenna some of those will be pointing back at the planet instead of into space. Airtraffic will have the biggest risk of interference (also because the frequency band is close).
So kidding aside you will need to make very certain that (1) you have the right permits and (2) that your gear is not inadvertently sending out a dirty signal. The narrower the better. Better start shopping for a second hand spectrum analyzer ;)
Half of the problem is recieving signals back, as you can't just turn up the power on the satellite. I suppose if you knew exactly what command to send, and there was no form of handshaking this might not be a problem.
That said, I was really disappointed that the dish antennas were dismantled at Onizuka AFB [1] (aka the 'blue cube') they were originally part of a group of space craft communication satellites and could even track things in LEO (fun to watch a giant dish following a satellite)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onizuka_Air_Force_Station