Full Earth Disc Images From GOES-17 Harvested By SDR

We’ve seen lots of hacks about capturing weather images from the satellites whizzing over our heads, but this nicely written how-to from [Eric Sorensen] takes a different approach. Rather than capturing images from polar satellites that pass overhead a few times a day, this article looks at capturing images from …read more

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How 5G is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk

If the great Samuel Clemens were alive today, he might modify the famous meteorological quip often attributed to him to read, “Everyone complains about weather forecasts, but I can’t for the life of me see why!” In his day, weather forecasting was as much guesswork as anything else, reading the …read more

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New Space ISAC plans to elevate the industry’s awareness of cyberthreats

At a time when corporations are planning to blanket the heavens with high-tech hardware, the space industry is creating an information sharing and analysis center — a nonprofit organization that helps to track cyberthreats for member companies and related government agencies. The Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center (S-ISAC) will be housed within the National Cybersecurity Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado as a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization created to improve awareness about securing cyberspace. S-ISAC itself has not released much public information about how it plans to coordinate the space industry around its mission, but a news release from its founding company — Kratos Defense and Security Solutions — says the ISAC was created in response to long-recognized “information sharing gaps within the cybersecurity and space community.” San Diego-based Kratos said it has “coordinated the organizational planning and federal government charter, funded the Space ISAC startup costs, and developed the operational […]

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Humanity Creates a Cloud of Space Garbage, Again

With the destruction of the Microsat-R reconnaissance satellite on March 27th, India became the fourth country in history to successfully hit an orbiting satellite with a surface-launched weapon. While Microsat-R was indeed a military satellite, there was no hostile intent; the spacecraft was one of India’s own, launched earlier in …read more

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Solar Circuit Sculpture Pumms the Night Away

A word of warning: Google for the definition of the word “pummer” at your own risk. Rest assured that this beautiful solar-powered circuit sculpture fits the only definition of pummer that we care to deal with.

For the unfamiliar, a pummer is a device from the BEAM style of robotics, …read more

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Radio Free Blockchain: Bitcoin from Space

Cryptocurrencies: love them, hate them, or be baffled by them, but don’t think you can escape them. That’s the way it seems these days at least, with news media filled with breathless stories about Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies, and everyone from Amazon to content creators on YouTube now accepting …read more

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Es’hail-2: Hams Get Their First Geosynchronous Repeater

In the radio business, getting the high ground is key to covering as much territory from as few installations as possible. Anything that has a high profile, from a big municipal water tank to a roadside billboard to a remote hilltop, will likely be bristling with antennas, and different services …read more

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Think of satellites as big, vulnerable IoT devices, researcher says

Orbiting hunks of metal make it possible for billions of earthlings to benefit from marvels of the digital age, from GPS signals and weather monitoring systems to the communication protocols for credit card authorizations and other complex transactions. Humans take these satellite connections for granted, but new research suggests we’ll need to take important steps to keep it way. As of January there were at least 1,957 satellites in orbit, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, some of which are vulnerable to various levels of snooping and disruption, including jammed communications, data interception, data hijacking and outright takeovers. The issue is especially urgent now because of the coming wave of connected devices and the evolution of 5G cellular networks, said Bill Malik, vice president of infrastructure technologies at the security vendor Trend Micro, who presented research on satellite security Wednesday at the RSA cybersecurity conference. “We didn’t think about this much until the popularization of […]

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Oops… Britain Launched A Satellite, But Who Remembers It?

Did you know Britain launched its first satellite after the program had already been given the ax? Me neither, until some stories of my dad’s involvement in aerospace efforts came out and I dug a little deeper into the story.

I grew up on a small farm with a workshop next to the house, that housed my dad’s blacksmith business. In front of the workshop was a yard with a greenhouse beyond it, along one edge of which there lay a long gas cylinder about a foot (30mm) in diameter. To us kids it looked like a torpedo, and I …read more

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Tech startups are making security moves sooner. They don’t have much of a choice.

For David Cowan, the tipping point was a cyberattack from Anonymous. Cowan, a venture capitalist at Bessemer Venture Partners, had spent years asking startup founders what they planned to do if hackers targeted their business. Often, the founders on the other side of the boardroom would shrug and say, “We don’t hold any personal information, so they don’t need to come after us.” That changed, he said, after the email marketing company SendGrid was hit in 2013 with a denial-of-service attack that ultimately caused about 20 percent of the young company’s clients to walk away, not too long after Bessemer had led a $21 million funding round for the company The attack occurred after an employee, Adria Richards, publicly complained that a developer from the gaming company Playhaven made sexual remarks in the audience at the 2013 PyCon tech conference. Playhaven fired the employee, infuriating an online mob that sent Richards death threats. Anonymous got involved too, […]

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