Satellites and access

[Ian]

Just about who can gain access to remote sensing satellites? Can just about anyone who has a good radio antenna do it? If someone makes their own amateur radio telescope, do they have to get permission from nasa to access their satellites or the satellite of another nation? Just curious.

 

[Ziggurat]

Just about who can gain access to remote sensing satellites? Can just about anyone who has a good radio antenna do it? If someone makes their own amateur radio telescope, do they have to get permission from nasa to access their satellites or the satellite of another nation? Just curious.

I'm sure you would need permission to do it legally. To do so illegally is likely to require serious hacking. With something like a satellite, there's bound to be some sort of security protocol, so that the satellite will only accept commands from legitimate sources (otherwise you're risking a lot of money on something that someone else can ruin with just a little effort). Probably some very heavy encryption, at least when it comes to command and control transmissions.

 

[Ian]

Satellites

There are probably hackers who could probably make complicated programs in order to get past the encryption programs that Nasa and other people would put in. Nasa probably does a lot of research on what hackers can do in order to prevent hackers from controlling their satellites. I hope.

 

[Hellbound]

I wouldn't be suprised if most satellites used some sort of proprietary command language, perhaps based on a hardware encryption model. I'd assume that, because of the various roles and functions that a satellite could be designed for, the "operating system" would have to be unique for each one (or each series). It would be a simple matter to create some sort of hardware key that must be in palce to access the satellite, as well as extensive passphrases and similar to access anything in the central core of the system.

So you'd have to build your transceiver, dechipher the command language (which may or may not be anything related to english...it could be entierly bit-based...with commands run on a local computer, converted, then transmitted). The entire system could well be set up to only listen for commands from certain locations or transmitters, so you'd have to work around that. Then you may have to overcome some hardware or firmware based encryption key and/or password system.

I really don't think it'd be feasible...I can almost garauntee it wouldn't be profitable.