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Router Tested On Satellite In Space
The Cisco router launched into orbit in September onboard a satellite built by SSTL (and on a Russian rocket) has now been successfully tested in space, and there's a video describing this and putting routers in space. A neat twenty-year coincidence here: an early Surrey satellite has been operating for twenty years, and Cisco launched its fastest router on its twentieth birthday. What do the next twenty years hold for fast routers in space?
But did they fix the latency yet?
You need ping to play Quake from space!
Only sadness for the poor routers out there all alone.
The satellite with the Cisco router has been hijacked by attackers using a recently discovered Cisco vulnerability. Experts believe the intent is to launch a denial of service attack on the Cassini-Huygens probe. Upon gaining root access, the attackers patched the vulnerability and changed the passwords. A multi-million dollar space mission is planned next week to manually press the reset button on the router.
Unknown host pong.
Solution? Disconnect your LAN/WAN interfaces so the rotuer frees up enough memory to create the shell. Oh, better be local when you do this...
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
The sats that SSTL build are generally earth-obs sats - they're midway through a global monitoring constellation to provide 24/7 distaster and earth monitoring to a group of many countries. The router, therefore, will be being used on the onboard data networks between the system and sensor modules, uplink/downlink, OBC etc. I have a feeling that this is only being tested, so it'll run in parallel with their normal satellite data shunts and their multiple redundant networks.
Being in LEO, it's in the line-of-sight of any one ground station for about 10 minutes at a time, and not on every orbit. Despite the movement, continuous data transmission is entirely possible over LEO constellations - as Iridium's 66 sat constellation shows.
SSTL are micro, mini (and recently nano) sat builders, and they're currently building a test sat for the Gallileo GPS alternative for the European Space Agency.
Why do I know this? My uni course was run in collaboration with them...
Routers in space will be the first steps towards an interplanetary internet. The folks at CCSDS (Consultive Committee for Space Data Systems) have been working on an interplanetary internet specification for a while now. Some additional technical details and other information is also available. Very interesting stuff.