This is interesting. The ROSAT X-ray observatory is expected to burn up in about a week and it has quite a checkered and colorful history. According to Wikipedia, ROSAT was originally planned to be launched on the Space shuttle but the Challenger disaster caused it to be moved to the Delta rocket platform. Then on April 25th 1998, failure of the primary star tracker on the X-ray Telescope led to pointing errors that in turn had caused solar overheating. It was severely damaged on September 20th 1998 when a reaction wheel in the spacecraft’s Attitude Measuring and Control System (AMCS) reached its maximum rotational speed, losing control of a slew, damaging the High Resolution Imager by exposure to the sun.
In 2008, NASA investigators were reported to have found that the ROSAT failure was linked to a cyber-intrusion at Goddard Space Flight Center.
The root of this allegation is a 1999 advisory report by Thomas Talleur, senior investigator for cyber-security at NASA. This advisory is reported to describe a series of attacks from Russia that reached computers in the X-ray Astrophysics Section (i.e. ROSAT’s) at Goddard, and took control of computers used for the control of satellites, not just a passive “snooping” attack. The advisory stated:
“Hostile activities compromised [NASA] computer systems that directly and indirectly deal with the design, testing, and transferring of satellite package command-and-control codes.”
Other reports said the attack may have been only coincidental with the failure, but we’ll never know for certain. Since the failure of the satellite in 1998, due to atmospheric drag, the satellite has slowly lost height.
From Spaceweather.com:
The ROSAT X-ray observatory, launched in 1990 by NASA and managed for years by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), will return to Earth within the next two weeks. Current best estimates place the re-entry between Oct. 22nd and 24th over an unknown part of Earth. Although ROSAT is smaller and less massive than UARS, which grabbed headlines when it re-entered on Sept. 24th, more of ROSAT could reach the planet’s surface. This is because the observatory is made of heat-tolerant materials. According to a DLR study, as many as 30 individual pieces could survive the fires of re-entry. The largest single fragment would likely be the telescope’s mirror, which is very heat resistant and may weigh as much as 1.7 tons.
ROSAT is coming, but it’s not here yet. On Oct. 13th, Marco Langbroek photographed the observatory still in orbit over Leiden, the Netherlands:
Photo details: 5 second exposure, Canon EOS 450D, ISO 400
“I observed ROSAT this evening in deep twilight,” says Langbroek. “It was bright, magnitude +1, and an easy naked-eye object zipping across the sky where the first stars just had become visible.”
Update: Scott Tilley of Roberts Creek, British Columbia, made a video of ROSAT on Oct. 15th: “It did get pretty bright, at least 1st magnitude, as it passed overhead after sunset.”
ROSAT will become even brighter in the nights ahead as it descends toward Earth. Local flyby times may be found on the web or on your smartphone.
Also, check the German ROSAT re-entry page for updates.
The role of space weather: Solar activity has strongly affected ROSAT’s decay. Only a few months ago, experts expected the satellite to re-enter in December. However, they did not anticipate the recent increase in sunspot count. Extreme ultraviolet radiation from sunspots has heated and “puffed up” Earth’s atmosphere, accelerating the rate of orbital decay. The massive observatory now has a date with its home planet in October.
Read the book “The Cuckoo’s Egg” (I forget the author’s name). It’s about the cyber snooping on military networks, using the Berkley Livermore Labs open computors. The author could not get anyone’s attention for years, as he traced and stymied the hacker. Turns out it was a German young man who was paid by the Russians for information found.
How do you spell I-N-C-O-M-P-E-T-E-N-C-E ?
Robert Farrer in Johannesburg reports the following:
“It will be visible in Jozie on 26 October 2001 at about 19H41 for about 20 seconds, if you are interested in finding out where to look for it go to: http://www.heavens-above.com and enter your co-ordinates and click on ROSAT to get more info.”
tesla_x says:
October 16, 2011 at 12:02 pm
This could be a serious national security issue if the hacking is real and the hackers are able to ‘steer’ the ‘projectile’ where they wish
Are you sure!
http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/news/1067456/Specsavers-astronaut-TV-ad-takes-off
Jim says “‘scuse me if I take this in the same vein as ‘sales pitch’ material. Full disclose: Virus-free and _not_ running any virus s/w (exc firewalls) since ’95 ”
I don’t think you know as much about computer security as you think you do. A firewall is one tool and a/v software is another. You can’t expect the firewall to protect you from everything.
Owen October 16, 2011 at 6:58 pm Whether the satellite is falling due to hacking or calculating mass in slugs and thrust in Newtons (or other such simple error) is anyone’s guess.
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It’s falling out of the sky because its orbit is decaying. This happens to all satellites. It is caused by drag induced by residual atmosphere and solar wind. Some spacecraft carry thrusters to regain orbital momentum. I’m not familiar with ROSAT but, since it is/was a telescope, it generally wouldn’t need orbital thrusters except for controlled deorbit. In any case, it was parked. The failure occurred in 1998,
Whoever stated about command codes:If I have control of the command computer for any significant length of time, I can passively monitor for as long as is needed to decipher/reverse engineer the command sequences (the hard part that takes patience). After that it is child’s play to send appropriate signals to screw something up, …
Anyone doing that would be faced with a rather incomprehensible stream of bits. Egyptian hieroglyphics were also incomprehensible until the Rosetta Stone appeared. An equivalent would be needed. Something not easy to come across.
The hacker claim is probably specious. NASA used to be a can-do organization but over the years it has turned into a rather inept bureaucracy with loads of internal politics. One of the reasons I’ve retired. The hacker claim could just conveniently support someone’s agenda. You gotta wonder why it took nearly 10 years to finally resolve a 1999 allegation — assuming the report even did that.
Just a couple of points;
1) The state of cyber security was a lot different when this was launched than it is today, it was also a lot different in 1998 when this ‘hack’ allegedly took place.
2) Nobody could hack in and put this thing on the ground with any precision whatsoever. 10 days out and they can’t tell you where or when within a 5 day window.(tesla x 12:02pm)
3) Apply Hanlon’s razor; no conspiracy, no hacking; i.e.; when they say ‘it ‘may’ have been hackers’, what they really mean is ‘It was probably something stupid we did, but we can’t prove that, and it doesn’t sound too good, so, since we can’t rule it out; we’ll go with mentioning this other vector that doesn’t make it seem like the 3 stooges were running the satellites, but rather a bunch of really smart scientists too tuned into what we’re working on to think of real world threats such as malcontent hackers and thusly fell victim to them.’
4) How many more of these things are there; satellites without any way to influence re-entry and enough mass to survive re-entry? There’s got to be a headcount and an evaluation to determine if we should pre-emptively be lassoing these things and redirecting their fall. Doesn’t the precautionary principle tell us that? (That’s a bit of sarcasm at work there, in case I didn’t make it plain enough to see.)
NASA maintains enough administrative log files from the mid-90’s (from certainly extinct systems) to provide evidence of “hacking” leading to a systems engineering and test failure – but we have to fight to get raw weather data?
Jean Parisot ,
To be fair, Science Data is kept separate from Housekeeping and usually belongs to the instrument teams. Even when owned by NASA the instrument team gets first crack at processing to protect discoveries from being scooped in publication.
Bob Kutz October 17, 2011 at 9:07 am 3) Apply Hanlon’s razor; no conspiracy, no hacking; i.e.; …
Amen except (* puh-leez! *)substitute “Engineers” for “Scientists”. The spacecraft are run by engineers. There’s a Funny floating around here showing how Engineers and Scientists see one another. A quote from the 60’s, “Get them d*mn scientists away from the rocket and shoot it!”. And the sotto voce (due to un-PC content), “Scientist drivers; no survivors”.
Get the picture?
I never said I did; I was expressing an opinion, which has some basis in fact, as well as disclosing my policy towards virus protection and virus protection software AND my experience to date.
If you want to go ‘groping about’ the internet for warez I can assure you that your success in getting ‘nailed’ by a virus is a LOT higher … my e-mail provider does a pre-scan for viri and I don’t click on attachments from ppl I don’t have any dealings with … some common sense applied to ‘surfing’ on the Internet goes a LONG ways to staying, sane as well as virus-free.
In my experience, not all EEs are created equal; this is another case-example to add to that collection I suppose …
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Was DECNET involved? Or just “internet” protocols?
(Having read the book’s account, I’m going to go with “internet” protocols and _not_ the proprietary Digital Equipment Corp. “DECNET” inter-machine protocol. Internet protocols, IIRC, were ‘weak’ at the outset; there wasn’t concern that outside ‘access’ would be granted to the network! Hello? ARPANET anybody?)
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So, “DesertYote”, can you legitimately reveal the old insecure and the secure but obtuse newer OS?
Regarding the book The Cuckoo’s Egg, periodically we hear of organizations getting caught by the same simple entry method as used in that case. A decade or so ago a large established manufacturer in the US midwest was. Ought to be a checklist. (Actually I think the US government has some that are publicly available.)