Slashdot Mirror
Web Enabled Spacecraft
gilgsn writes "Yahoo has an article from space.com about a satellite which will be operated by FTP over TCP/IP on the Internet! The CHIP (Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer) spacecraft will examine the stuff between stars, the so-called void of space that is actually rich with hot gas. The choice of protocol was dictated by economics. I wonder what OS it will run and if communications will be encrypted?"
Though they may have anticpated the slashdot effect.
Watch out: the RIAA will shut down the first Mp3 pirate server in space!
Oh no, that was MIR and yes, it crashed nicely after relatively long uptime (at least for Windows).
Windows SPACE! Service Pack 12.
In other news, a satellite was taken over by a 5 year old...
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
I can see the headlines now, "new satellite lauched and it is controlled from a windows 95 workstation at www.h4x0r-R-t0yz.com"
Surely they could've hacked together something better than that? If that's a question of economy, their budget must be extremely small.
I didn't read the article btw.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
called Cosmic Orbital Discovery (COD) is planned to go along with CHIPS
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
We were asked to come up with a fast cheap solution for getting two servers to keep in touch, and not have to change the company's firewall setup. Our solution was to use SOAP and JAXM, but our backup plan was to do everything via FTP...who knew we were in the same league as NASA?
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Why, it will run WindowsCE offcourse.
MS is working hard on the C_CHIP ActiveX control. Once that's done, for NASA it's just a matter of a simple drag&drop and 3 lines of VB code.
Who said space exploration was difficult ?
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Maybe it's just me, but doesn't it seem strange that it would be operated by FTP? I mean, one would think that being able to SSH to it and having a command prompt would be a lot more useful...
:)
Unless it's actually a cover and NASA is creating the first orbiting pr0n server
It wont take long for someone to crack the satellite. They will download images thinking to collect nice data about deep space but instead will find that some h@X0R has redirected their satellite to take a good close look at Natalie Portman.
Or...the first DDoS initiated from space will soon be in the headlines.
FTP? C'mon!
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Wow, I've never heard of FTP being used as a control protocol. Sure, HTTP might have been a bit much (although I doubt it. people have run webservers computers the size of matchheads. Even HTTP over a serial connection on an apple2). Why not use straight telnet with no options?
And I wonder how this control works, do you CD into a spesifc cordinate of space to examine? Can you DIR the stars it can see to find which ones to look more closely at, and then GET the acual data?
Hrm, actualy that would be kind of cool.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
...now all that stuff the US government keeps telling us about the danger of crackers and how they can cause millions of dollars worth of damage is TRUE!
You really only start to get high ping and latency if the sattelite is in a geostationary orbit, and this thing appears to be in a LEO, though the article didn't appear too clear about this, so ping times would prolly be less.
But I imagine ftp access wouldn't be too fussed about ping times, unless your trying to ftp into something like Pioneer 10 or something.
No no no. They'll be sending DIP, the digital interstellar plasmotromiter.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Couldn't they have picked better protocols? It seems to be me for reliability and performance that isn't the best of choices. There are alot of other protocols (XTP for example) that the government could have used instead. Although TCP/IP is so commonplace I wouldn't want my 15 million dollar satellite to depend on it.
What? No security through obscurity? I can hear the 5kr1p7 k1dd13z rejoicing...
J. |_337 H4x0r: D00d$$$ I took control of da satelite man! See hoe |337 I am!!!
J. |_3373r H4x0r: L00se, sux0r! I can make her spin round! Wheee! Wheeee!
J. |_337 H4x0r: What are you doing idiot you're taking her down!!!
J. |_3373r H4x0r: No way man. I'm much to |337 for that!! DAMMIT Windows crashed again! sux0rzzz!!!###
[Sattelite falls down to Earth]
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I'm probably missing something, but when did FTP mean that it was "web enabled"? Aren't ftp and http intended for different purposes etc?
There are computers worth more then $15m hooked up to the internet, I'm sure.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Ok, satellite running windows, yada yada, service pack yada yada, hacked by 12 year old, yada yada, Microsoft Windows for Space yada yada.
Ok, now I've gotten all the blindingly predictable jokes out of the way, can we move to something more interesting?
Read reviews of shopping cart software
I guess you can't expect most people nowadays to 'get' it, but come on, I'm sure most people on slashdot know the difference between the 'web' and the 'internet'. When something is web enabled that means you can access and control it using a web browser over HTTP. (although I suppose most browsers can use FTP these days).
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I hope they choose something else than the infamous wuftpd, or else the satellite might be doing other things then intended by the owners...
Hope it has an IP address, It would be cool to ping something not on earth.
In the first week after it goes online some kid will manage get a root shell, install Apache and leave a page stating that "IN SOVIET RUSSIA, DEEP SPACE PROBES YOU"...
Serious kudos to these guys for the work they're doing! From what it sounds like, they're using FTP inside of either a IPSec or custom layer 2 encrypted tunnel -- once you've been wrapped by that, you're mostly OK (though FTP servers in general have had some pretty nasty growing pains).
:-)
Some may be wondering why the use of FTP, instead of HTTP. Indeed, HTTP is a unified protocol capable of elegantly handling both (moderately) interactive command exchange and bulk data transfer. The problem is latency -- if this beast is going anywhere, there's going to be some significant (5-10 second, minimum) lag between issuing commands and receiving responses. In such an environment, you don't *want* interactive access; you want an elegant way of providing a series of commands and receiving a series of responses. FTP provides that -- among other things, while HTTP's capacity for downloading files is quite mature, anything more is asking a bit more of HTTP than it was designed.
FTP has specific commands for machine interaction w/ the file server -- NLST provides a standard formatted directory of files, independent of the underlying implementation. By contrast, Apache dumps some HTML.
WebDAV ("Web Folders) was meant to address complex file system operations under the rubrick of HTTP. Thus far, it hasn't been much of a success. It most likely never will be. Thus, FTP is used.
But FTP is built on TCP, and this introduces a problem: The affects of latency upon the underlying TCP error handling protocol. TCP implementations are notoriously untuned for the case of high bandwidth, high latency. They're built to assume the lack of a response implies either congestion on the line or packets being dropped; either way, implementations tend to scale back. Significant work has been done to address this case, mostly on the behalf of Satellite systems (the ultimate in high latency, high bandwidth access). Mostly, the idea is to expand window size (the amount of data that each side is allowed to send before it must receive an acknowledgement) to match the amount of data that's literally hanging amidst space and time on its way to its receiver. But this is a very hard problem, one of the few that the architecture of TCP has quite a bit of trouble scaling to handle.
NASA went to a bulk transfer protocol, partially because interactive performance across large distances is problematic. But the bulk transfer protocol itself is based upon an interactive error management protocol. It'd be interesting to repurpose an established protocol for error-handled bulk transfers for just this use...I'm certain one of the "reliable multicast" architectures out there would be an astonishingly elegant solution.
That's not to say they made the wrong choice with FTP -- particularly if they tuned their stacks well, and encapsulated themselves amidst lower layer security, great job! Just that there's lots of work in this arena left to do.
If I remember right, Vint Cerf and a couple of his colleagues were working on IP protocols suited for communication between Earth and Mars. We're talking *minutes* of latency! Now that'll be a hell of a hack
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
This project has been going on for quite sometime and has already been repeatedly demonstrated for low earth orbit satellites. For details please see:http://ipinspace.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Pedantic, I know, but FTP != web. HTTP == web. I know a lot of people don't grasp the difference between the internet and the world-wide-web, but you'd have thought someone writing web content might have got it right.
Also, ethernet != internet (the program manager for the project got that one wrong).
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
Conceivably, you could even control the satellite by ssh'ing into it and running various command-line apps. If you wanted to be really cute, run a web server on the satellite and make it controllable with web forms... but that strikes me as just a little over-elaborate :)
For security purposes, they mention using "standard commercial applications" to encrypt the link. Presumably that means they're running a VPN of some description. As an additional security measure, you'd presumably want to hide the thing behind a firewall and give it a non-global IP address (somewhere in the 192.168.*.*'s, presumably) so that it simply can't be reached from the wider internet, and then (if it was *really* necessary) set the firewall up so that the appropriate people can tunnel through.
Actually, it would be interesting if we could get a /. interview with one of the people behind this satellite (and grill them about their security measures). Roblimo, are you listening?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Personally, I find it very intriguing that they've chosen FTP as the protocol, though it does make a lot of sense. Most of what the sattelite is intended to do will be done in a pre-determined manner. Very little will be done in real-time. As a result, most instructions will be able to be scripted, and FTP is an excellent way of uploading scripted instructions to the sattelite. TFTP would've been even better, had it not been for the lack of access controls.
Now, that much said, when do you think we'll see the first DDoS of zombie spaceprobes? =)
The CHIP (Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer) spacecraft will examine the stuff between stars
"Calling Seven-Mary-Three and Four"
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
There is a page at berkeley.edu that talks in more depth about the satellite (http://chips.ssl.berkeley.edu/index.html) but doesn't really cover command/control and software issues. Maybe an Ask Slashdot for the maintainer of the page is in order?
-- I browse at +5 with stripped sigs
Remember this infamous bit of commenting?
in linux/net/ipv4/tcp_timer.cFTP, eh? Commercial software, eh? Low budget, eh? This is gonna be so easy.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
So where is my star ship with warp drive running LCARS?
And, this isn't the first satellite to use TCP/IP, by the way. TCP/IP has been run over satellite links numerous times, most often to demonstrate TCP's shortcomings in relation to better methods.
note: that's not to say that TCP/IP isn't a fine protocol -- it's a perfectly reasonable way to do things on a low BER, low latency network (i.e., the majority of networks we commonly use). I'd have the same criticisms of someone trying to run, for example, SCPS on a terrestrial network. It's the wrong tool for the wrong job.
SSH is the protocol they kept using to open and close the doors on the moon base. :-D
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
They'll need the 30+ mile long poles to hit Ctrl+Alt+Del...
On the Unix side -
That "No route to host" error becomes more meaningful.
"Uptime" will relate to orbit, not system.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
OTOH, doesn't TCP use alot of SYN, ACK etc. to establish/close a connection? This could be a problem because it multiplies the round trip time which could have been avoided by using a special purpose protocol.
I'm also wondering if there would be a high error rate because of atmospheric disturbances and such. If so, TCP would be really useful because you get error correction for free.
Ok, I read the article, but I can't see how it relates to Ponch and Baker?
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
Would this be the only way to legally host a file server for MP3's? Or does the RIAA presume its jurisdiction (and yes, I do believe it has elevated itself to an enforcement entity) now extends to outer space?
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
Control centers handle their own retransmission of lost/corrupted commands. They transmit a command and check the telemetry to see if it was received by the spacecraft. If it was lost, they retransmit the command. The details are very spacecraft dependent. Commands may execute immediately upon receipt or they may be split into two phases, load command and execute command. Some commands are time tagged for execution at a later time. A set of commands can be uplinked into a command buffer on the spacecraft, verified by a memory dump in the telemetry stream, and executed after the control center has verified that they got a good load of the command list.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Let's get this straight. The web uses the HTTP protocol, not FTP, so this web-enabled spacecraft headline is misleading. Browsers include an anonymous FTP client, so you can navigate and download from FTP servers, but that doesn't mean FTP is part of the web. The piece of news is the use of out-of-the-box Internet protocols in a spacecraft. It is great news. Save money by using solid, well-known technologies. This is part of the agenda of the new NASA, and it is basically good. You cannot reinvent the wheel in every mission. BTW, you still need a deep space antenna to contact the spacecraft, so it cannot be hacked unless the attacker breaks into a well-protected NASA site.
The technical paper is on the SpaceDev website.
They are using VxWorks, PSOS, OS-9, and Linux. Looks like VxWorks is what will be running on the satellite, with less than 20 lines of code in the actual communication routines...
LR
The Ground Systems Department at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center has a "new" system called Telescience Resource Kit (TReK) that allows experimenters to hook personal computers in their home labs up to experiments they are running aboard the International Space Station. The main entrance page is here, but most of the links are password protected...
it's at this link
RickTheWizKid
Lightening Slashdot users' days since 2001!
Alright, lets here it for War-orbiting!
DJMD - The fourth man - Planetary
Looking forward to the first CPAN mirror in orbit.
I know this was meant to be funny, but it's a very interesting thought. Sort of like the off-shore hosting companies, but taken several steps further.
Of course latency would always be an issue for something in space, but for a streaming protocol...
This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
A TCP-based protocol is exactly the right thing for this application. The only thing they have to watch out for is that they need to increase timeouts and other parameters that have been adjusted downwards in consumer machines for "performance reasons". FTP's use of separate control and data connections also makes it a little more attractive than alternatives.
I doubt authentication was a consideration--FTP is insecure anyway. They probably use firewalls.
Am I the only one having a hard time swallowing that bit?
Sounds like some clueness reporter pulled a TLA out of a hat or something...
Unless the FTP is being used as a sort of batch command transmission vehicle... A little like the IPN protocol specifies. A sort of connectionless command line over a connected protocol.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
...And I have a shell account, haha! Email me and I'll ask the admin about getting you one, too: spacejunk@satellite.nasa.gov
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
Thank you, Ovidian. I'm glad someone brought this up first. I was going to mention it, but didn't want to seem like I was nit-picking. Since when does an FTP server make something "web enabled"?
Seriously, just because modern web browsers can issue a limited subset of the commands defined in the FTP protocol doesn't mean that FTP is part of "the web". I was using FTP long before there was ever a "Web". If you upload anything via FTP on a regular basis, the difference is readily apparent.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Phew! After that RS-232 fiasco I guess the FTP protocol would be the next logical choice! Aren't FTP commands transmitted unencrypted as plain text. Looking to impress a girl, hack the satellite and have a shooting star at your command.
This
Here are some website links:
Spacedev is (duh)
www.spacedev.com
CHIPSat can be found under Missions.
Spacedev's stock price can be found at:
finance.yahoo.com
The Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley
chips.ssl.berkeley.edu
Don't be silly. You can't run Cat5 into space, it's too long of a run. This is definitely a job for single-mode fiber
So, in college, I worked with some astrophysicists at the Enrico Fermi Institute, which is where they build nuclear powered satellites, and took some classes from professors at at The Laboratory for Advanced Space Research, which is responsible for building such satellites/spacecraft as Ulysses, Pioneer 10 & 11, Cassini, StarDust, and Argos.
Anyhow, from talking with folks at the EFI and LASR, the general answer to everybody's questions is: latency and noise. Remember, this is a Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer, which means that it's going to be sent away from the earth, and eventually be millions and billions and trillions + miles away. The longer that it works, the more latency is going to build up... So, the programming needs a very non-interactive protocol. If this thing goes interstellar, it could take days and weeks for packets to travel from Earth to CHIPS and back.
Remember, it takes 4 minutes for light from our closest neighboring star to reach earth, traveling at, well, the speed of light. In all probability, this CHIPS will be using radio frequencies which are much, much slower. (I could be wrong, but I would be surprised if they had hacked some type of interstellar laser guidance system... )
Anyhow, they write scripts for this kind of mission, and generally operate with a big time lag, to the extent that it's sort of like typing with your computer monitor turned 'off'. That is, they'll figure out what they want the satellite to do for the next week or next month, type up a script, and 'submit' it to CHIPS. A couple of hours/days/weeks later, CHIPS will receive the script and start working. This kind of astrophysics programming generally involves being able to project into the future (temporally), and to know that in {x} days, the satellite will be past Mars, in {x+a} days, it'll be past the asteroid belt, in (x+a+b} days, past Jupiter, in {x+a+b+c} days, past Saturn, and so forth. It also requires good file keeping and record keeping, so that you know how many days {n} into the project you are, so you can calculate {n-x}, which gives you the time window for submiting an FTP control sequence.
Other than that, yeah... they can dir things and get thing. Depends on the exact implementation, but you have the concept.
The CHiPs spacecraft will be ground controlled by Officers 'Ponch' Poncherello and Jon Baker.
Everything you say about FTP is correct -- on an interactive protocol level.
But latency at the protocol layer is not what they're trying to solve (indeed, they'd be using TCP either way, so they're having protocol issues with latency no matter what). They're trying to solve latency from the perception of the operator, by batching all of his requests into a job file. And it's standardized access to a remote file system that FTP addresses well. While HTTP does all you claim, it does an undeniably poor job of standardizing the presentation of remote files. NASA's centralized all their custom programmatic work -- both in the encoding of batched commands, and the decoding of batched results -- into a tarball. (At least, that's what I'm assuming -- I've done the same thing in the past.)
Once you have these batches, everything is utterly standard. Yes, HTTP lets you download multiple files at a time. From which URLs? Ah, you must download the HTML, pick out all the links, create an index, from those links, and start pipelining a number of requests. How many requests? How deep can the pipe go? And dear god, uploading data into a HTTP system is an utter pain in the ass.
You can build things with wget and curl. But should you?
Sure, you can twist a web server into doing all this. But it's not what it was designed for. HTTP may offer significantly fewer round trips, but its presentation of a remote file system is immature at best and a horrifying fault of HTTP at worst. How many people do you know who FTP their updated web pages into the servers? Is there even a lightweight text editor with *HTTP* support?
FTP's all about centralizing the difficulty into the file format. HTTP ends up screaming at you(a human) to use a web browser to click some icons and fill out some forms.
A simple example: wget a directory served by apache. Notice all the files with weird names, like =AQ and whatnot? Those are alternate directory indexes. Grab the same directory of files over FTP, still using wget. This works right.
Funny -- the latency win is from serializing i/o to individual files. HTTP's so bad at file management, that its use would actually threaten the viability of using files...the protocol issues, both TCP and Layer 7 just get lost in the backwash compared to that.
--Dan
P.S. Yes, I looked into doing this over SSH...you could do something like:
ssh user@satellite "scan_here -o scan1; scan_there -o scan2; tar czvf - scan1 scan2" | tar xzvf -
or even:
$ cat > test.sh
scan_here -o scan1;
scan_there -o scan2;
tar czf - scan1 scan2;
ssh user@host "`cat test.sh`" | tar xzf -
This also works, and with bigger scripts, but I haven't fixed a bug with it not exiting when it's done (it's with the tar on the client side):
cat test.sh | ssh user@host | tar xzf -
I threw 20K commmands into test.sh and it worked perfect.
--Dan
TCP/IP notorously bad for high latency/high error rate connection.
Hacking together a special use protocol with a push stream with ton of error corrections is not a big deal.
Or, what they are talking about is a connection up to the uplink station?
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
In all probability, this CHIPS will be using radio frequencies which are much, much slower. (I could be wrong, but I would be surprised if they had hacked some type of interstellar laser guidance system... )
Sorry for replying to my own post, however, I stand corrected. I was describing 'Radio Waves' in terms of accustic sound waves; which, in this case, does not apply. Ignore this comment regarding radiowaves being slower...
kind of misread that as
'WEP enabled spacecraft '
I can imagine loads of script kiddies aiming Pringles cans into the sky....
Hmmm--- Was thinking about accessing the internet via satalite. Now I can access the satalite via the internet. How cool ;-)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
SpaceDev, the company that constructed CHIPSat, today sent out an email announcement that the launch of CHIPSat was delayed due to problems with the launch vehicle.
The announcement is reproduced below:
eAnnouncement
CHIPSat Launch Delayed
December 19, 2002
Due to circumstances beyond our control, the CHIPSat launch scheduled for Thursday, December 19, 2002 on a Delta II rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base has been delayed and is now targeted for January 8, 2003.
The launch was delayed due to a technical glitch in the Boeing-manufactured launch vehicle. The technical problem is associated with the signal the ordnance box provides for launch vehicle devices to unlatch and separate the payload fairing. NASA is expecting the replacement of this unit to take approximately two weeks.
SpaceDev designed and built the CHIPS (Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer) spacecraft and associated subsystem products (e.g. Miniature Flight Computer) for the University of California, Berkeley under a NASA-funded contract. The CHIPS mission is designed to study the formation of stars, and will have a life span of about one year.
CHIPSat will be the first mission ever to use end-to-end satellite operations over the Internet with TCP/IP and FTP. This concept was analyzed and demonstrated by the OMNI team via UoSat-12; however, SpaceDev will be the first to implement the concept as the only means of satellite communication.
SpaceDev has overall responsibility for the design of the mission, the design, assembly, integration and testing of the microsatellite, and mission control and operations from Spacedev's Mission Control Center.
If there are any further delays, we will send out an update immediately.