Anyone one know why that can happen?
Is it that a title sounds interesting, so people upvote (this one had 86 votes) but noone actually reads or finds anything of interest in the article to discuss?
Just curious.
I, for one, find it interesting that anyone with the necessary equipment can observe spaceships and satellites, etc and what they might be doing far away.
Are signals not encrypted or is this entirely via observation somehow?
As the sibling comment mentions, command signals are normally at least signed, and many times also encrypted.
Telemetry is way less sensitive, so it is usually not encrypted in scientific missions. There are well known protocols for space communications (e.g. CCSDS, PUS), so once you figure out a few fields you can make educated guesses of what each byte is. A previous post of the linked blog discusses it in detail: https://destevez.net/2020/08/tianwen-1-telemetry-framing-and...
Even without the actual telemetry, there are many things you can guess about the satellite attitude from just observing the radio signal. Many satellite and radio amateurs love doing that!
Comments are for bickering. Not having comments but being on the front page is a sign of good, wholesome, undisputed content.
Would love to hear someone who actually knows this stuff speak to it.
The uplink (control commands)would be encrypted for sure but the downlink (telemetry) is often not for scientific missions. For military or commercial it's a different thing obviously.
Even SpaceX' launch cams (downlink) were not encrypted for a while and amateurs received them. Only when this made the news they started encrypting them. Probably because they do military launches too (the cameras for those on their web feed shut down when the payload is visible, but this would possibly show those)
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/receiving-video-directly-from-a-spac...
I'm sure I've seen a name for this effect somewhere, but I don't remember it. Does anyone else know?
> a google search reveils no alternative meaning
You could file this under "yet another deterioration of google effectiveness by personalisation of search results", except it's not even true? I put "attitude" in and it gave me a dictionary expand-o-box with "3. the orientation of an aircraft or spacecraft, relative to the direction of travel."
I get programming results even for non programming terms. I am pretty confident that's not the case for my mom.
It stands to reason that people's search results could be wholly uninformative if Google thinks the subject matter is unlike what you usually read.
>a google search reveils no alternative meaning
A Google query that worked well for me to learn more about this was 'attitude orbit'. Including another word from the knowledge area (borrowed from the article title) helped Google understand the context I was searching within:
> Attitude is part of the description of how an object is placed in the space it occupies. Attitude and position fully describe how an object is placed in space.
So, basically, its relative orientation and rotation.
>5 : the position of a craft (such as an aircraft or spacecraft) determined by the relationship between its axes and a reference datum (such as the horizon or a particular star)
define:attitude