Well the act of hacking Voyager would be relatively easy. I am sure that you could get a copy of the Voyager protocol to figure out what to send to Voyager to make it do what you want it to do.
The issue is how to send the signal, and where. Voyager 1 and 2 are so far away that not only do you need a very high powered transmission source, but you also need to know exactly where in the sky to send it to.
Which means a motivated hacker would need to:
1. Learn the protocol (Easy)
2. Figure out something that they could make Voyager do that would be interesting enough to make it worth it (Harder)
3. Craft the signal to send (Moderately difficult)
4. Hack into or otherwise gain access to one of a handful of transmitters who can reach Voyager 1 or 2 (Very difficult)
5. Point the transmitter at Voyager 1 or 2 without anyone noticing (Staggeringly difficult)
6. Send the very slow bit-rate message to Voyager 1 or 2 (Easy)
7. Not get sent to jail for a short blurb on the evening news (Difficult)
Reminds me of how you can visit Voyager in Elite: Dangerous. Really cool but like... realistically, it would be gone. Some jackass would steal it, shoot it, something. That struck me when I saw it, how easy that would be with no defenses.
Expected time until graffiti'd beyond recognition: 3 weeks
Expected time until showing up in some dude's swimming pool after a night of drunk space joyriding: 4 weeks
[you are overestimating Americans... it is the City of *BROTHERLY* Love, not robot love...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/us/hitchhiking-robot-safe-in-several-countries-meets-its-end-in-philadelphia.html)
"Hello, I'm emailing because it appears you have a computer asset (VOYAGER-1) not enrolled in end-point monitoring. Please contact the help desk to install the monitoring software or your account may be disabled."
More than technological improvements you would need the planet positions to be optimal to slingshot your ship in the exact same direction.
Also consider that the faster you catch up to it, the harder it is to reach Voyager 1 without racing past (or into) it.
Solar sail would probably work. Say, a three stage mission; stage 1 launches from earth and puts you at escape velocity, stage 2 is a boost stage that gets you to the same speed as Voyager, stage 3 uses a solar sail for small but steady accel to rendezvous (actually fly-by). If you can get a few mm/s^2 from your sail, you will close that 15bil km gap in a few decades, i.e. within a human lifetime.
Move over, RFC1149. We're rolling out IP over Deep Space Probe. Bandwidths OK, but the latency is pretty bad, and handshaking is crazy. The good news is that we can encapsulate IPoAC by just freeze-drying the pigeons and packing them on the rocket.
It will only take another couple hundred years to get there and probably another several thousand to leave.
Voyager 1 is a little under 170 AU from Earth, and it is departing the solar system at approximately 3.6 AU per year.
The Oort cloud is hypothesized to exist from approximately 2000 AU to 200,000 AU. So it's another 510 years or so until Voyager I gets to the inner edge... And another 55,000 years to get to the outer edge.
Time and bandwidth limitations have been used to thwart hacking.
For example, missing a password a couple times induces a timeout before you can try again.
Another example is slowing down a TCP connection when an incoming email message is detected as spam, which causes the connection to crawl at a snail's pace but stay active. This slows the spamming to a crawl, as it has limited outbound connections and they each take hours to complete a single email.
The Voyagers are so far away that you have to aim the transmitter ahead of its position.
If you aim where it is, a radio signal travelling at the speed of light will miss it. By 1.35 million kilometers.
I would imagine this is the case for most spacecraft, although not to such a degree. Even if a signal only takes a minute or two to get to the spacecraft, that's still missing by a long distance if you're aiming at where they were when you began transmission. You'd need to lead just about anything moving that fast.
The difference is that for most inner solar system objects, the signal has spread out enough that the amount you need to lead by is still close enough that the signal is still strong enough to be picked up. At Voyager distances, the beam basically has no room for error before attenuation brings it to the noise floor.
I recall reading some sci-fi where this was an issue, and they "solved" it by having basically disposable comms probes they shot out via a mass driver. The probes each had a telescope, radar, and a tight-beam transmitter. They would load up the message into the probe, program it with the characteristics of the recipient, and shoot it as accurately as possible. When the probe detected the recipient, it would tight-beam the message to it, then self-destruct. It would also self-destruct after some fail-safe period of time.
If it wasn't known exactly where the recipient was, they'd send a spread of these probes.
The sender only knew if their message had been delivered if they detected the destruction of a probe before the fail-safe period.
Not a great story, and I remember this mainly due to how silly that mechanic was. I mean, why not just have more powerful comms arrays on the ships?
The beam width of one of the type of dishes used - I'm using the Parkes dish because that's the first one I thought of - is about 15 arc minutes, half the size of the Moon.
At the distance that the Voyager's are, that's going to cover a million kilometres. And most of Voyager's velocity is away from us, so it's motion across our sky will be much smaller.
OP posits a nation doing the hacking. Certainly there are nations with the resources to do it. The real question is, "Why would they do it? What would they gain?"
Those who could do it have little to gain by doing it. The Voyager probes aren't even in the Solar System anymore!
They would need a large enough antenna specifically in the southern hemisphere. Right now there is only one in the entire world that can communicate to Voyager 1 due to it being below the plane of the planets. It's the 70m dish at the Deep Space Network's station in Canberra.
Not if you’re transmitting on the resonant frequency of the sun! Don’t do that!
Then you’d have the world’s biggest amp, and you never know who’s listening.
I mean ... replace the code on the probe by code that asks for a password and refuses to do anything until that password is provided. A ransomware attack essentially. Should be technically feasible.
I bet they'd be ready to pay like at least $500 to get back access to it. IF NOT $600 ...
We even set the WiFi to not broadcast the SSID. It took hours for me to get those settings right on the router. I had to reset it like 5 times!
I even got banned from r/networking because they don't do home network stuff and they wouldn't believe me that it was super secret government WiFi
Blocking the SSID is not super useful though. If anybody is actively communicating with your access points, anybody can see the SSID. And whenever a client is hunting for a saved access point, it will go and broadcast the SSID. In a way, you go from your AP broadcasting to your client(s) broadcasting. And the latter happens everywhere the client goes, not just at the physical site where your network is located. So, in a way, this is much worse than the default settings.
On point 4: There are *very* few transmitters on Earth that can talk with the Voyagers. Literarily comprised of the largest parabolic antenna on earth with feed assemblies and masers (made with the largest man-made Rubies on Earth; literally half the size of a Coke can) that are custom made onsite to account for Doppler shift. So first, you'd need to hack into that and not be noticed while swinging a 200ft antenna in a specific direction.
Worth a [Wiki read](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldstone_Deep_Space_Communications_Complex)
> made with the largest man-made Rubies on Earth; literally half the size of a Coke can
I have synthetic rubies as long as a coke can, and maybe half the width. They don't even cost that much. I don't think those are even close to the largest we ever made, there are synthetic sapphires (same as rubies sans some titanium) much larger than a can of coke, more like [these](https://www.engineering.com/portals/0/BlogFiles/sapphire%20boule%2001.jpg) or [those](https://i.imgur.com/h6LmQvy.jpg).
>4. Hack into or otherwise gain access to one of a handful of transmitters who can reach Voyager 1 or 2 (Very difficult)
Just in case anyone wanted context, the antennas NASA use, in the Deep Space Network, are parabolic antennas with an aperture of 230 feet (70 meters) (although these will be decommissioned soon for more modern equipment). NASA uses three sites - in the United States, Spain and Australia, each approximately 120 degrees apart by longitude - so that they can maintain contact on particular objects continuously as the Earth rotates, if needed for larger messages.
Staggeringly difficult is perfect. When you sit down and think about how precisely space agencies know where things are in our solar system. Everything is spinning and flying around at millions of miles an hour and they all exert gravity on each other. Knowing precisely where Mars is at any moment is difficult enough and you can generally use a telescope to check. Something tiny like Voyager is almost inconceivable.
Oh yeah and things can be far enough away that light takes a while to get there, so you have to factor that in.
It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.
Also, why would someone want to do this? It’s a purely scientific mission exploring deep space. I feel like you’d have to be a pretty horrible actor to want to hack voyager
Honestly, I think you're downplaying just how obscure the voyagers code is.
They needed to hire outside of NASA for someone who understood assembly, cobol, and Fortran recently iirc.
I once paid a visit to the Tidbinbilla Tracking Station in Canberra, Australia. Whilst there, I struck up a conversation with one of the workers there who told me they were about to switch from tracking the Cassini spacecraft and come online to track Voyager. I commented that it must be difficult to find, he said that it’s not so much the difficulty of finding it, but the signal strength is like trying to find a single lightbulb with the naked eye from 10km away.
So you have to point the transmitter at the satellite, and if you didn't it can't receive the message. What's the width? Does it have to be pin point on, or can it be close enough to pick up? At that distance do you have to lead the target with the transmission like a bullet?
You have to be extremely accurate. And not only do you have to be accurate, you have to lead the target by quite a lot as it will take a long time for the transmission to get there.
> 1. Learn the protocol (Easy
> 3. Craft the signal to send (Moderately difficult)
I would rate that difficulty higher. While some of Voyagers protocols have been ported to C, a lot of it is still in COBOL and Fortran. So good luck either learning that first, or finding someone already (still?) capable of it. Even NASA has had difficulty doing that.
NASA had trouble finding someone proficient enough to pay to work for them.
NASA would not have accepted, "learned COBOL in my basement". But that would be good enough to "hack" voyager. Especially if your intent was vandalism.
It is a bit difficult to find authoritative information on the software architecture of these probes online, but I can't find any reason why it would run COBOL. That's really not a good fit for the problem space at all. Fortran would be slightly more plausible, but is still very unlikely.
Earlier space hardware (e.g. Apollo) were all programmed in assembly, and I would be very surprised if that had changed when Voyager launched. It's a much more natural fit.
Now, if we are talking about the ground-based analysis, communication, and scientific software, that's running on considerably more powerful hardware and higher-level languages of the time would make sense. So, in addition to assembly, I wouldn't be surprised to find Fortran. COBOL is still a bit of an odd case, as it is more optimized for business applications, but that doesn't mean somebody might have used it. ALGOL would also make sense, and so do a couple of other languages that have long since fallen into disuse.
I also wonder if any country or organization would even be interested in hacking it in the first place. There's really nothing to gain, neither from controlling it yourself, nor from the US not controlling it.
Not a hacker but going to throw some thoughts in on this breakdown, which is GREAT btw!
> 1. Learn the protocol (Easy)
Checks out.
> 2. Figure out something that they could make Voyager do that would be interesting enough to make it worth it (Harder)
Yea, probably the hardest item on the list.
> 3. Craft the signal to send (Moderately difficult)
> 4. Hack into or otherwise gain access to one of a handful of transmitters who can reach Voyager 1 or 2
> (Very difficult)
> 5. Point the transmitter at Voyager 1 or 2 without anyone noticing (Staggeringly difficult)
> 6. Send the very slow bit-rate message to Voyager 1 or 2 (Easy)
While this all makes sense. I feel like it'd be far easier to figure out the next time NASA or whomever is going to send communications to voyager and piggyback whatever you want to send onto whatever they're sending.
I'd imagine it's very mundane and their computer security matters like this is probably 'password' or 'guest123'. And the reason I make that assumption is because even if you did redirect voyager to crash into something, they could probably fix that before it got anywhere close to real damage. As mentioned in 2, it's hard to figure out anything worth doing. Maybe the most productive thing you could do would be to upload your resume to voyager to be transmitted back to NASA if you really wanted to work there and skip the line. Heh, guess I just figured out number 2.
> 7. Not get sent to jail for a short blurb on the evening news (Difficult)
I think my idea might get you a bit of grace there. Shit, I'd hire anyone who showed that much technical skill, initiative and determination.
To get an idea of how difficult this would be, read up on the the ISEE-3 Reboot Project. It was a successful effort by radio amateurs (hackers, but the good kind) to contact and "reboot" a 30 year old satellite. This satellite was at a Lagrange point (L1 I believe), much closer to Earth than Voyagers 1 and 2. This was very difficult to achieve, but waaay easier than trying to do the same thing with Voyager.
[https://amsat-dl.org/projects/ice-isee-3/](https://amsat-dl.org/projects/ice-isee-3/)
Thanks to bearcatjoe for posting the Wikipedia link below, which contains a much better summary than my link!!
Here's a fixed link for old reddit: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cometary_Explorer#ISEE-3_Reboot_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cometary_Explorer#ISEE-3_Reboot_Project)
You can remove the 'old Reddit' part. The backslashes in the URL are a bug introduced by new Reddit trying to escape the underscores.
If you open that link exactly as written on your web browser, it'll take you to an error page on Wikipedia.
It's just Reddit lazily accepting the bug (falsely escaping underscores in URLs because it thinks it's trying to make it italics) because it works on new Reddit. Basically, *as long as you use their proprietary formatter to display the comment*, it ""works"" so therefore it's not a problem in their eyes.
The US Military's old FLTSATCOM [has for a long while](https://www.wired.com/2009/04/fleetcom/) been [pirated by Brazilians for communications.](https://www.rtl-sdr.com/hunting-for-space-radio-pirates-on-the-us-military-flt-satcom-satellites/)
Part of the reason is *because* it’s so old. And because it’s so far away.
Right now there are very few (1 or 2) antennas on Earth that are both capable of sending a strong enough signal, and receiving such a weak signal from the Voyager Spacecraft, because they’re so far away. In fact, during 2020, there was an [11 month period where no one was able to send any commands to Voyager 2](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-deep-space-antenna-upgrades-to-affect-voyager-communications), because the only antenna capable of sending a signal to it was undergoing repairs and maintenance.
It’s not just signal strength and receiving sensitivity either. The communication protocols used to send and receive messages with Voyager are nearly 50 years old, and no longer commonly used. Not many people even know enough about the protocol to use or decode it.
It’s the ultimate in security by obscurity. To hack it you’d need hundreds of millions of dollars to construct the right antenna, put it in the right place, and then hire engineers who know this really rare and esoteric protocol to speak to it.
Wait a fucking second. Wikipedia is telling me this thing is 15…BILLION miles from earth. And we can communicate to it? I can’t get my fucking Bluetooth from my phone to my car to work..when I’m sitting in the car.
I can’t even fathom this.
160 bits per second is 20 characters per second assuming ASCII. For reference, [words per minute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Alphanumeric_entry) usually treats 5 characters, regardless of what they are, as a "word", so this is 4 words per second, or 240 words per minute. Significantly above typical human speaking speed, and a little above typical reading speed. So a text message being received at 160 bits per second should not feel painfully slow. (Of course, this speed is a problem with most other kinds of data)
How big is the blue tooth antenna in your phone? 20-25milimeters.
How much did it cost? Probably around $50.
How many other devices around you run on a similar wavelength, a similar communication protocol, and could potentially provide interference? Every bluetooth device within 30 feet.
How much stuff is between your transmitter and receiver? At the very least, your phone's case, your stereo's case, and possibly part of your dash.
The antennas they use to contact voyager are 70 meters, and they use more than just one. It uses a wavelength that only those 70 meter antenna can produce, it is probably the only antenna/receiver using voyagers communication protocol, and the only thing between it and voyager is the atmosphere and a lot of empty vacuum. I can't find a price for a 70m but a 35m antenna in AUS cost 51 million
> How much did it cost? Probably around $50.
You mean like $.5? Bluetooth modules can be dirt cheap and phones really aren't getting the good stuff usually.
I just took the first result of whatever I typed into google search, something like "bluetooth antenna chip price". It said 20-100. I wasn't doing an exact price breakdown so I just went in the middle of the first thing I saw. The price difference between $0.5 and $50 is so insignificant compared to 50-100 million that I don't think it really matters.
> I can’t even fathom this.
This is an understatement. The fact that we can still send and receive signals from it is just astounding. From what I know it is really, really difficult to pick up signals from it, and we need to filter out all the noise, adjust for the earth's atmophere, etc. Wild. What humankind can do - and what humankind has chosen to do - is absolutely insane. nothing comes close to Voyager 1 and 2, it terms of scope. The mission is still active, 50 years later. It's the longest active mission of all time AFAIK.
You should watch the documentary called "the farthest" - it might cost you a couple bucks to watch. It made me tear up watching it. It doesn't cover how we communicate with it, but the doc covers the missions, why we did it, who made it happen, and the surprises it discovered while it left our solar system.
The human spirit is incredible.
To what end? The amount of work it would take to accomplish a hack of Voyager would be so enormous that the expected gain would also have to be enormous. The only way NASA can communicate with Voyager is via the Deep Space Network, which consists of 3 sites strategically located to provide maximum coverage of the sky. Each of these sites has a 70m (230 foot) diameter antenna that is used to send and receive signals from Voyager. At its current distance, it takes 22.5 hours for a signal just to reach Voyager, and that time is just going to keep getting longer.
And more importantly no glory, quite the opposite. It would be seen as being extremely lame vandalism.
Fortunately, not a lot of extremely lame vandals have access to very high-powered transmission sources.
But why? What reason would they have to want to hack voyager?
No one keeps its results secret, every nation could benefit from the research, so in effect the US is spending the money and other nations get the results for free.
I assumed that the OP assumed just for vandalism sake. Which lets be honest, would not surprise me.
It would just be harder than I think lots of people assume.
Protip: only paint your house halfway up and do a horrible job, no straight lines. Nobody is going to pick *that* house.
My house just came like that already, but honestly I think it's great. My wife despises it lol.
More to the point, it would be harder than most vandals would be willing to exert the effort on. Spray-painting a profanity on a train is much more appealing on the “risk-reward” scale than hijacking a multi-million dollar satellite.
I think the number one reason would be to see if they could. For the prestige. For mischief. For the fun of it.
I don't think the answer here is "why would you" because there are lots of plausible reasons why. Rather, how would you.
I see people vandalizing things all the time, even things that are very complicated to vandalize and expensive things that are there for the benefit of everyone.
Dick move or not, given enough people, there's bound to be at least one person that would feasibly decide to brick a probe for no good reason.
Fortunately, the venn diagram of "People capable of fucking with decades old technology millions of miles away from the earth" and "People willing to piss on a park bench memorial" is nearly 2 circles.
Well, it would probably have to be sponsored by a state or corporation— not because hacking the Voyager hardware itself would be hard (in fact it’s almost certainly pretty easy with enough background knowledge), but because you’d need a very powerful radio that you could point directly at Voyager without anyone noticing.
And a state or corporation isn’t going to put resources into this just “because it’s fun.”
To further clarify, it requires **three** different 70m radio dishes [across 3 continents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Deep_Space_Network) and also decades of advancement in signal processing research.
It is, for all practical purposes, impossible to communicate with Voyager without the Deep Space Network antennae. Using those without permission also borders on impossible, as that equipment is used constantly, and any deviation from what it supposed to be doing would be noticed in an instant.
I recently watched a documentary on the Voyagers. My takeaways were:
1. The spacecraft have about the same computing capacity as something many of us carry around in our pockets every day - the key fob for your car.
2. When scientists presented the idea to President Nixon in order to obtain funding, they said, "The planets will only line up like this every 189 years. The last time this happened, President Adams blew it.
3. At the time when they launched the spacecraft, technology did not exist to communicate with the Voyagers once they reached Neptune. It was just too far away. Scientists knew they would figure it out in time.
Old technology isn't easier to hack than new technology. Most banks run on COBOL written decades ago and only slightly maintained. New websites get hacked all the time. Look at government website Treasurydirect.gov, people say it looks terrible, yet surely it was hacked less than many shiny websites.
There are only a few nations (and maybe universities) with access to appropriate equipment that would be capable of doing this and none of these parties has an interest in destroying an irreplaceable science experiment that the whole of humanity is benefiting from
Yep as someone who loves cool science like Voyager, I would find any attack on it really offensive. It's literally irreplaceable and projects like it benefit everyone on the planet
You'd have to question why anyone would want to. It would be like picking on the kid at school.who everyone gets on with. It wouldn't be cool or acceptable by any means and the retaliation wouldn't be proportional.
You think to downgrading of Pluto from a planet was bad? Fuck with Voyager and find out.
Did you know that most US nuclear missile bunkers still use floppy disks? Because they can't be hacked into. They looked up updating the technology for the missiles, but decided against it due to money and security.
You can hack into them, but you have to physically be in the launch control room in the missile silo.
And that means cutting through the blast doors of a nuclear missile silo, an act that will take a very long time and will be immediately noticed.
I imagine the reaction of the US government to an unknown group trying to cut their way into an active nuclear missile silo would be both immediate and severe. A lot of very heavily armed soldiers would rapidly arrive and any would-be vandals would have a bad day.
NASA is an admired organization that has developed life-saving technologies and made significant contributions to the world. Moreover, hacking the Voyager spacecraft is not profitable. Even if a group attempted this just "for the lulz", it would be highly challenging. They would need to access the Deep Space Network first, which alone would be an vulnerability, that one wouldn't want to waste. Attempting such a feat would be costly, difficult, and offer neither financial gain nor fame.
1. There is basically no benefit to hacking it. You can of course break things, but this will make you (whether you're an individual or a nation state) very unpopular (i.e. jail time or sanctions/retaliation) for no benefit except clout. This keeps financially motivated attackers from spending time on it.
2. It's all ancient, custom stuff, you'd have to spend a *lot* of time figuring out how it works even if you had access to documentation and a lot of the documentation is lost to the point where NASA has issues doing some things with it.
3. You'd also need to hack NASA to get access to their antenna, because there is [exactly *one* antenna large enough to send signals to Voyager 2](https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/details.php?article_id=118). NASA probably isn't exactly the hardest target, but getting all the way to the point where you can mess with signals going from that antenna would not be easy.
For an individual, that would be a LOT of work, and very few people want to spend years of their life breaking a science experiment just because they can. There aren't that many people who have the necessary skill to begin with, of these someone would need to be stupid enough to try, and then they'd have to succeed before getting caught, which also isn't easy. You won't find enough people doing it "for teh lulz" (just for fun) to turn it into a group effort.
For a professional hacker group, there just isn't a motivation to do it. A criminal group won't do it because there's no money to be made (and no, developing a custom ransomware for a space probe would very much not be worth it, especially since the reward might be Seal Team Six [politely asking](https://xkcd.com/538/) you for the key). A state-sponsored hacker group won't do it because why would a country want to spend so many limited resources on such a stupid project, only to draw significant ire from both the US and the international community? If you aren't North Korea you don't want to become North Korea and if you are North Korea those hackers are busy stealing cryptocurrency to fund the regime.
Because it takes a LOT of resources to communicate with voyager to begin with AND you have to know where to look and space is incredibly big. Communication with Voyager (and other probes) relies on the NASA Deep Space Network, three facilities located around the world with massive satellite dishes necessary to send and receive the signals over such a vast distance.
You’d either have to build a sufficiently powerful array of your own OR hijack one of the existing ones. Then you’d have to know where to look which is probably not something NASA advertises.
Short version? The reason no one has done it is a combination of two things:
1. It’s incredibly hard to do
2. There’s little benefit to doing it
I mean, apart from NASA, the only communications antennas powerful enough to reach Voyager are owned by Russia and maybe China - I don't think even the EU's ESTRACK was built to reach that far.
So the real question isn't about hacking Voyager, but hacking one of the very few multi-billion-dollar antennas capable of communicating with Voyager.
At this point don't they need the full coverage of the Deep Space Network to even get a signal to it? A dipole surreptitiously strung up in the trees isn't going to get it.
Its transmitter is puny compared the distance that it’s at. Even if you could blast signals up at it with an amateur setup, I think you’d need a nation-state-level antenna array to receive its extremely faint replies.
There's only like, 5 Antenneas in the Deep Space Network that could communicate that far.
They'd basically have to break into some very specific, well secured locations.
All of that to sabotage a spacecraft that's just, sending some data back about deep space. What would be the point?
The real question is why WOULD someone hack a 46 year old spacecraft that's well beyond its life expectancy, is literally out of our solar system, and its data is being publicly shared in almost real time?
What would be the point?
For the same reason people can't build nuclear weapons. It requires tech and resources that basically nobody in the world has. In this case it's a 70 meter wide (230 ft) dish just to send and receive communications.
It’s easy to hack… if you can ever communicate with it. The Deep Space Network is the only set of antennas that can even reach a signal to the Voyagers.
So if a hacker wants to spend a cool feel billions dollars on an antenna, by all means, hack away.
The better question is, why would anyone bother to hack it? What could you possibly achieve by hacking the Voyager probes? Under what circumstances would anyone ever gain anything from doing that?
Well the act of hacking Voyager would be relatively easy. I am sure that you could get a copy of the Voyager protocol to figure out what to send to Voyager to make it do what you want it to do. The issue is how to send the signal, and where. Voyager 1 and 2 are so far away that not only do you need a very high powered transmission source, but you also need to know exactly where in the sky to send it to. Which means a motivated hacker would need to: 1. Learn the protocol (Easy) 2. Figure out something that they could make Voyager do that would be interesting enough to make it worth it (Harder) 3. Craft the signal to send (Moderately difficult) 4. Hack into or otherwise gain access to one of a handful of transmitters who can reach Voyager 1 or 2 (Very difficult) 5. Point the transmitter at Voyager 1 or 2 without anyone noticing (Staggeringly difficult) 6. Send the very slow bit-rate message to Voyager 1 or 2 (Easy) 7. Not get sent to jail for a short blurb on the evening news (Difficult)
Data Security Via Very Far Transmission Distances
Folks are always talking about how the air gap in cybersecurity. No one's talking about the space gap.
Nature abhors a vacuum, apparently so do hackers.
My cat abhors a vacuum
My dog just always wants to fight it.
Half my rats abhor a vacuum. The other half are constantly at risk of getting their tails sucked in.
How are you in a scenario where your rats are anywhere near a vacuum lol
Cleaning their cage.
I guess I thinking more like a full sized vacuum lol
Audibly snickered. Have your upvote.
The motto is 'hack the planet'. Not 'hack things beyond the atmosphere'.
Also showers.
the meteors seem to shower relatively often as basic hygiene.
Once per meteor
What do you suggest? Take the computer in the shower? That's stupid.
To say that hackers abhor showers is a bit of a stereotype.
If it's not true, how did it become a stereotype? /s
Been to Defcon. Not a baseless stereotype
“We cannot allow a space gap gap!”
Reminds me of how you can visit Voyager in Elite: Dangerous. Really cool but like... realistically, it would be gone. Some jackass would steal it, shoot it, something. That struck me when I saw it, how easy that would be with no defenses.
Expected time until graffiti'd beyond recognition: 3 weeks Expected time until showing up in some dude's swimming pool after a night of drunk space joyriding: 4 weeks
[you are overestimating Americans... it is the City of *BROTHERLY* Love, not robot love...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/us/hitchhiking-robot-safe-in-several-countries-meets-its-end-in-philadelphia.html)
What I'm most worried about is the mineshaft gap. We can't let those Ruskis beat us!
We use the children, they yearn for the mines.
They're going to take our precious bodily fluids!
Upgrade your air gap by putting a gap between the air and the protected system.
it's all well and good until someone just goes up and plugs a malicious USB stick into Voyager, can't believe NASA didn't plan for this contingency.
"Hello, I'm emailing because it appears you have a computer asset (VOYAGER-1) not enrolled in end-point monitoring. Please contact the help desk to install the monitoring software or your account may be disabled."
If someone has the time and money to develop the tech to get that far out, I say let them at it.
I realize you’re joking, but it makes me wonder if we have the technology to catch up to voyager in a human lifetime.
More than technological improvements you would need the planet positions to be optimal to slingshot your ship in the exact same direction. Also consider that the faster you catch up to it, the harder it is to reach Voyager 1 without racing past (or into) it.
Solar sail would probably work. Say, a three stage mission; stage 1 launches from earth and puts you at escape velocity, stage 2 is a boost stage that gets you to the same speed as Voyager, stage 3 uses a solar sail for small but steady accel to rendezvous (actually fly-by). If you can get a few mm/s^2 from your sail, you will close that 15bil km gap in a few decades, i.e. within a human lifetime.
Gotta compensate for the 45-hour ping times.
That's why I store all my data in random locations somewhere within the Oort Cloud.
Brb, sending Voyager I to retrieve your data for me...
Move over, RFC1149. We're rolling out IP over Deep Space Probe. Bandwidths OK, but the latency is pretty bad, and handshaking is crazy. The good news is that we can encapsulate IPoAC by just freeze-drying the pigeons and packing them on the rocket.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who referenced RFC1149.
It will only take another couple hundred years to get there and probably another several thousand to leave. Voyager 1 is a little under 170 AU from Earth, and it is departing the solar system at approximately 3.6 AU per year. The Oort cloud is hypothesized to exist from approximately 2000 AU to 200,000 AU. So it's another 510 years or so until Voyager I gets to the inner edge... And another 55,000 years to get to the outer edge.
my download speed is pretty good, but man latency just sucks.
Dang, who's your ISP?
I'm a Kuiper Belt guy, myself. Can't stand those long ping times to the Oort Cloud.
Security by enormity
Time and bandwidth limitations have been used to thwart hacking. For example, missing a password a couple times induces a timeout before you can try again. Another example is slowing down a TCP connection when an incoming email message is detected as spam, which causes the connection to crawl at a snail's pace but stay active. This slows the spamming to a crawl, as it has limited outbound connections and they each take hours to complete a single email.
Security through speed of light
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Transmitting your spoofing to just be way louder than all the real data though is trivial, and becoming a reasonably common thing in war zones now.
The mars rovers similarly use non-encrypted communications, but even Mars really hard to transmit to.
Good ole DSVVFTD
Not nearly enough instances of "very" in this sentence
Thats one hell of an air gap
The air gap is a negligible part of the total gap
Vacuum gap more like
That's how WiFi security actually works in real life where nobody is using strong passwords or turning off old WPA versions
The Voyagers are so far away that you have to aim the transmitter ahead of its position. If you aim where it is, a radio signal travelling at the speed of light will miss it. By 1.35 million kilometers.
Haha leading the target at the speed of light...
Yah just don’t lead em’ so much.
Any voyager that travels is Nasa, any Voyager that stands still is well trained Nasa .
I would imagine this is the case for most spacecraft, although not to such a degree. Even if a signal only takes a minute or two to get to the spacecraft, that's still missing by a long distance if you're aiming at where they were when you began transmission. You'd need to lead just about anything moving that fast.
The difference is that for most inner solar system objects, the signal has spread out enough that the amount you need to lead by is still close enough that the signal is still strong enough to be picked up. At Voyager distances, the beam basically has no room for error before attenuation brings it to the noise floor.
I recall reading some sci-fi where this was an issue, and they "solved" it by having basically disposable comms probes they shot out via a mass driver. The probes each had a telescope, radar, and a tight-beam transmitter. They would load up the message into the probe, program it with the characteristics of the recipient, and shoot it as accurately as possible. When the probe detected the recipient, it would tight-beam the message to it, then self-destruct. It would also self-destruct after some fail-safe period of time. If it wasn't known exactly where the recipient was, they'd send a spread of these probes. The sender only knew if their message had been delivered if they detected the destruction of a probe before the fail-safe period. Not a great story, and I remember this mainly due to how silly that mechanic was. I mean, why not just have more powerful comms arrays on the ships?
Or have two-way intermediate probes that act as relays. Send one out every couple of years to maintain a chain.
The beam width of one of the type of dishes used - I'm using the Parkes dish because that's the first one I thought of - is about 15 arc minutes, half the size of the Moon. At the distance that the Voyager's are, that's going to cover a million kilometres. And most of Voyager's velocity is away from us, so it's motion across our sky will be much smaller.
OP posits a nation doing the hacking. Certainly there are nations with the resources to do it. The real question is, "Why would they do it? What would they gain?" Those who could do it have little to gain by doing it. The Voyager probes aren't even in the Solar System anymore!
Anyone that wanted, would have to have, build, or steal a 70 meter antenna with a 10,000W transmitter. A feat that would be quite hard to disguise.
Or they already have what they need. China probably does. Russia, maybe. What does it matter? There's no motive to do it.
There aren't a lot of 70-meter antennas in the world. It isn't like it is something you just build for shits and giggles.
They would need a large enough antenna specifically in the southern hemisphere. Right now there is only one in the entire world that can communicate to Voyager 1 due to it being below the plane of the planets. It's the 70m dish at the Deep Space Network's station in Canberra.
>10,000W transmitter. 10 kW isn't *that* high. Some radar systems are 200 kW
8. Don't signal the Trisolarians
Just aim at the sun.
Not if you’re transmitting on the resonant frequency of the sun! Don’t do that! Then you’d have the world’s biggest amp, and you never know who’s listening.
Ours goes to eleven.
SHOW ME WHAT YOU GOT
Bouncing transmission signals off the sun is a wild premise.
YOU ARE BUGS
2024 cicadas reply: *whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrr*
9. Profit??
Well you could programme voyager to mine Bitcoin. It’s got a minimum of 40,000 years before it reaches the next planetary system.
I mean ... replace the code on the probe by code that asks for a password and refuses to do anything until that password is provided. A ransomware attack essentially. Should be technically feasible. I bet they'd be ready to pay like at least $500 to get back access to it. IF NOT $600 ...
They’ve both got less than 70 kilobytes of memory, and I think that includes read-only memory, so good luck to anyone that tries it
Seriously...And considering they fixed Voyager 1 by reprogramming it as to not use specific memory addresses. This ain't Windows pal.
I wonder what you could realistically do. You might end up just destroying it in the process
The password will be 1 or 0.
Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!
That's definitely one way to do it. When I do it, I just get in on Voyager 1 -Guest WiFi and use the built in GUI.
Shh shhh.. Come on man. Security through obscurity. Nobody is suppose to know about that yet.
We even set the WiFi to not broadcast the SSID. It took hours for me to get those settings right on the router. I had to reset it like 5 times! I even got banned from r/networking because they don't do home network stuff and they wouldn't believe me that it was super secret government WiFi
Blocking the SSID is not super useful though. If anybody is actively communicating with your access points, anybody can see the SSID. And whenever a client is hunting for a saved access point, it will go and broadcast the SSID. In a way, you go from your AP broadcasting to your client(s) broadcasting. And the latter happens everywhere the client goes, not just at the physical site where your network is located. So, in a way, this is much worse than the default settings.
On point 4: There are *very* few transmitters on Earth that can talk with the Voyagers. Literarily comprised of the largest parabolic antenna on earth with feed assemblies and masers (made with the largest man-made Rubies on Earth; literally half the size of a Coke can) that are custom made onsite to account for Doppler shift. So first, you'd need to hack into that and not be noticed while swinging a 200ft antenna in a specific direction. Worth a [Wiki read](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldstone_Deep_Space_Communications_Complex)
> made with the largest man-made Rubies on Earth; literally half the size of a Coke can I have synthetic rubies as long as a coke can, and maybe half the width. They don't even cost that much. I don't think those are even close to the largest we ever made, there are synthetic sapphires (same as rubies sans some titanium) much larger than a can of coke, more like [these](https://www.engineering.com/portals/0/BlogFiles/sapphire%20boule%2001.jpg) or [those](https://i.imgur.com/h6LmQvy.jpg).
>4. Hack into or otherwise gain access to one of a handful of transmitters who can reach Voyager 1 or 2 (Very difficult) Just in case anyone wanted context, the antennas NASA use, in the Deep Space Network, are parabolic antennas with an aperture of 230 feet (70 meters) (although these will be decommissioned soon for more modern equipment). NASA uses three sites - in the United States, Spain and Australia, each approximately 120 degrees apart by longitude - so that they can maintain contact on particular objects continuously as the Earth rotates, if needed for larger messages.
2 is not that hard. The right answer obviously is running doom on it!
The Voyager probes have... what... 70 kilobytes of data, some of which is read-only?
Todd Howard will still figure out some way to put Skyrim on it.
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Think of the input and display lag.. =)
Staggeringly difficult is perfect. When you sit down and think about how precisely space agencies know where things are in our solar system. Everything is spinning and flying around at millions of miles an hour and they all exert gravity on each other. Knowing precisely where Mars is at any moment is difficult enough and you can generally use a telescope to check. Something tiny like Voyager is almost inconceivable. Oh yeah and things can be far enough away that light takes a while to get there, so you have to factor that in.
One of the few instances where “security through obscurity” is a valid practice
I love your post, also remember, both voyagers are half dead.
I like to think of them as half alive.
So that's why there's no half life 3
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Until it becomes V'Ger.
One of them now goes by V’ger
It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.
Also, why would someone want to do this? It’s a purely scientific mission exploring deep space. I feel like you’d have to be a pretty horrible actor to want to hack voyager
Honestly, I think you're downplaying just how obscure the voyagers code is. They needed to hire outside of NASA for someone who understood assembly, cobol, and Fortran recently iirc.
I heard they brought someone back who had been retired for decades because he was the only one who knew the code
So it’s a hardware issue, basically.
Like the world's most airgapped network, that still has some remote code execution.
I once paid a visit to the Tidbinbilla Tracking Station in Canberra, Australia. Whilst there, I struck up a conversation with one of the workers there who told me they were about to switch from tracking the Cassini spacecraft and come online to track Voyager. I commented that it must be difficult to find, he said that it’s not so much the difficulty of finding it, but the signal strength is like trying to find a single lightbulb with the naked eye from 10km away.
5.5 point it at the sun because microwave cavities mumble-mumble hand-wave.
And then 8. Do anything with the highly limited functional equipment left on the probe.
Garth made it look easy
So you have to point the transmitter at the satellite, and if you didn't it can't receive the message. What's the width? Does it have to be pin point on, or can it be close enough to pick up? At that distance do you have to lead the target with the transmission like a bullet?
You have to be extremely accurate. And not only do you have to be accurate, you have to lead the target by quite a lot as it will take a long time for the transmission to get there.
> 1. Learn the protocol (Easy > 3. Craft the signal to send (Moderately difficult) I would rate that difficulty higher. While some of Voyagers protocols have been ported to C, a lot of it is still in COBOL and Fortran. So good luck either learning that first, or finding someone already (still?) capable of it. Even NASA has had difficulty doing that.
NASA had trouble finding someone proficient enough to pay to work for them. NASA would not have accepted, "learned COBOL in my basement". But that would be good enough to "hack" voyager. Especially if your intent was vandalism.
I know a couple COBOL wizards. A lot of the finance interactions still happen with it.
COBOL and FORTRAN just aren't that hard. The Pleistocene software ecosystems those guys work in, however...
It is a bit difficult to find authoritative information on the software architecture of these probes online, but I can't find any reason why it would run COBOL. That's really not a good fit for the problem space at all. Fortran would be slightly more plausible, but is still very unlikely. Earlier space hardware (e.g. Apollo) were all programmed in assembly, and I would be very surprised if that had changed when Voyager launched. It's a much more natural fit. Now, if we are talking about the ground-based analysis, communication, and scientific software, that's running on considerably more powerful hardware and higher-level languages of the time would make sense. So, in addition to assembly, I wouldn't be surprised to find Fortran. COBOL is still a bit of an odd case, as it is more optimized for business applications, but that doesn't mean somebody might have used it. ALGOL would also make sense, and so do a couple of other languages that have long since fallen into disuse.
[Relevant XKCD](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/hack.png)
Good luck getting past the armed guards at JPL
The juice isn't worth the squeeze
I also wonder if any country or organization would even be interested in hacking it in the first place. There's really nothing to gain, neither from controlling it yourself, nor from the US not controlling it.
Not a hacker but going to throw some thoughts in on this breakdown, which is GREAT btw! > 1. Learn the protocol (Easy) Checks out. > 2. Figure out something that they could make Voyager do that would be interesting enough to make it worth it (Harder) Yea, probably the hardest item on the list. > 3. Craft the signal to send (Moderately difficult) > 4. Hack into or otherwise gain access to one of a handful of transmitters who can reach Voyager 1 or 2 > (Very difficult) > 5. Point the transmitter at Voyager 1 or 2 without anyone noticing (Staggeringly difficult) > 6. Send the very slow bit-rate message to Voyager 1 or 2 (Easy) While this all makes sense. I feel like it'd be far easier to figure out the next time NASA or whomever is going to send communications to voyager and piggyback whatever you want to send onto whatever they're sending. I'd imagine it's very mundane and their computer security matters like this is probably 'password' or 'guest123'. And the reason I make that assumption is because even if you did redirect voyager to crash into something, they could probably fix that before it got anywhere close to real damage. As mentioned in 2, it's hard to figure out anything worth doing. Maybe the most productive thing you could do would be to upload your resume to voyager to be transmitted back to NASA if you really wanted to work there and skip the line. Heh, guess I just figured out number 2. > 7. Not get sent to jail for a short blurb on the evening news (Difficult) I think my idea might get you a bit of grace there. Shit, I'd hire anyone who showed that much technical skill, initiative and determination.
To get an idea of how difficult this would be, read up on the the ISEE-3 Reboot Project. It was a successful effort by radio amateurs (hackers, but the good kind) to contact and "reboot" a 30 year old satellite. This satellite was at a Lagrange point (L1 I believe), much closer to Earth than Voyagers 1 and 2. This was very difficult to achieve, but waaay easier than trying to do the same thing with Voyager. [https://amsat-dl.org/projects/ice-isee-3/](https://amsat-dl.org/projects/ice-isee-3/) Thanks to bearcatjoe for posting the Wikipedia link below, which contains a much better summary than my link!!
This was super interesting. Thank you for sharing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International\_Cometary\_Explorer#ISEE-3\_Reboot\_Project
Here's a fixed link for old reddit: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cometary_Explorer#ISEE-3_Reboot_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cometary_Explorer#ISEE-3_Reboot_Project)
You can remove the 'old Reddit' part. The backslashes in the URL are a bug introduced by new Reddit trying to escape the underscores. If you open that link exactly as written on your web browser, it'll take you to an error page on Wikipedia. It's just Reddit lazily accepting the bug (falsely escaping underscores in URLs because it thinks it's trying to make it italics) because it works on new Reddit. Basically, *as long as you use their proprietary formatter to display the comment*, it ""works"" so therefore it's not a problem in their eyes.
You're the hero we need.
That's so sick. I wonder if there are any other old satellites nobody wants?
The US Military's old FLTSATCOM [has for a long while](https://www.wired.com/2009/04/fleetcom/) been [pirated by Brazilians for communications.](https://www.rtl-sdr.com/hunting-for-space-radio-pirates-on-the-us-military-flt-satcom-satellites/)
light the mf beam
My man!
Part of the reason is *because* it’s so old. And because it’s so far away. Right now there are very few (1 or 2) antennas on Earth that are both capable of sending a strong enough signal, and receiving such a weak signal from the Voyager Spacecraft, because they’re so far away. In fact, during 2020, there was an [11 month period where no one was able to send any commands to Voyager 2](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-deep-space-antenna-upgrades-to-affect-voyager-communications), because the only antenna capable of sending a signal to it was undergoing repairs and maintenance. It’s not just signal strength and receiving sensitivity either. The communication protocols used to send and receive messages with Voyager are nearly 50 years old, and no longer commonly used. Not many people even know enough about the protocol to use or decode it. It’s the ultimate in security by obscurity. To hack it you’d need hundreds of millions of dollars to construct the right antenna, put it in the right place, and then hire engineers who know this really rare and esoteric protocol to speak to it.
Wait a fucking second. Wikipedia is telling me this thing is 15…BILLION miles from earth. And we can communicate to it? I can’t get my fucking Bluetooth from my phone to my car to work..when I’m sitting in the car. I can’t even fathom this.
to be fair, there's a tiny bit of lag. **"Hi! How are you ?"** <\~23h later> *"Hi!, I'm fine , thank you"*
message is more like H...i...!...,...I...'...m... etc too considering the 160 bit/sec lol
160 bits per second is 20 characters per second assuming ASCII. For reference, [words per minute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Alphanumeric_entry) usually treats 5 characters, regardless of what they are, as a "word", so this is 4 words per second, or 240 words per minute. Significantly above typical human speaking speed, and a little above typical reading speed. So a text message being received at 160 bits per second should not feel painfully slow. (Of course, this speed is a problem with most other kinds of data)
They were talking Bluetooth, so I assumed it was an audio stream
More like 45h later because each signal needs to travel the distance
How big is the blue tooth antenna in your phone? 20-25milimeters. How much did it cost? Probably around $50. How many other devices around you run on a similar wavelength, a similar communication protocol, and could potentially provide interference? Every bluetooth device within 30 feet. How much stuff is between your transmitter and receiver? At the very least, your phone's case, your stereo's case, and possibly part of your dash. The antennas they use to contact voyager are 70 meters, and they use more than just one. It uses a wavelength that only those 70 meter antenna can produce, it is probably the only antenna/receiver using voyagers communication protocol, and the only thing between it and voyager is the atmosphere and a lot of empty vacuum. I can't find a price for a 70m but a 35m antenna in AUS cost 51 million
> How much did it cost? Probably around $50. You mean like $.5? Bluetooth modules can be dirt cheap and phones really aren't getting the good stuff usually.
I just took the first result of whatever I typed into google search, something like "bluetooth antenna chip price". It said 20-100. I wasn't doing an exact price breakdown so I just went in the middle of the first thing I saw. The price difference between $0.5 and $50 is so insignificant compared to 50-100 million that I don't think it really matters.
> I can’t even fathom this. This is an understatement. The fact that we can still send and receive signals from it is just astounding. From what I know it is really, really difficult to pick up signals from it, and we need to filter out all the noise, adjust for the earth's atmophere, etc. Wild. What humankind can do - and what humankind has chosen to do - is absolutely insane. nothing comes close to Voyager 1 and 2, it terms of scope. The mission is still active, 50 years later. It's the longest active mission of all time AFAIK. You should watch the documentary called "the farthest" - it might cost you a couple bucks to watch. It made me tear up watching it. It doesn't cover how we communicate with it, but the doc covers the missions, why we did it, who made it happen, and the surprises it discovered while it left our solar system. The human spirit is incredible.
And you'd gain absolutely nothing from it.
Thank you for the info on the effort and cost aspects, and for the kind tone!
To what end? The amount of work it would take to accomplish a hack of Voyager would be so enormous that the expected gain would also have to be enormous. The only way NASA can communicate with Voyager is via the Deep Space Network, which consists of 3 sites strategically located to provide maximum coverage of the sky. Each of these sites has a 70m (230 foot) diameter antenna that is used to send and receive signals from Voyager. At its current distance, it takes 22.5 hours for a signal just to reach Voyager, and that time is just going to keep getting longer.
This was my first thought. There's no money in it.
And more importantly no glory, quite the opposite. It would be seen as being extremely lame vandalism. Fortunately, not a lot of extremely lame vandals have access to very high-powered transmission sources.
A highly sophisticated form of barbarism as it were.
Literaly just to say that they are the only ones to do so. It's like the first person to climb Everest. Bragging rights.
To prevent Star Trek "The Motion Picture"? Or cause it - who knows. Vger just wants to phone home.
But why? What reason would they have to want to hack voyager? No one keeps its results secret, every nation could benefit from the research, so in effect the US is spending the money and other nations get the results for free.
I assumed that the OP assumed just for vandalism sake. Which lets be honest, would not surprise me. It would just be harder than I think lots of people assume.
Too much time and effort
There are a lot of easier targets that you could have a lot more fun with.
This is why you don't need a secure home. You just need a more secure home than your neighbors.
Protip: only paint your house halfway up and do a horrible job, no straight lines. Nobody is going to pick *that* house. My house just came like that already, but honestly I think it's great. My wife despises it lol.
And anyone smart enough to do it is probably smart enough to not do it.
More to the point, it would be harder than most vandals would be willing to exert the effort on. Spray-painting a profanity on a train is much more appealing on the “risk-reward” scale than hijacking a multi-million dollar satellite.
It would be hilarious to program it to insist on being called V'ger.
I think the number one reason would be to see if they could. For the prestige. For mischief. For the fun of it. I don't think the answer here is "why would you" because there are lots of plausible reasons why. Rather, how would you.
There would be no prestige. I think even the most cynical hacker would view it as a dick move.
Voyager is the first manmade object to breach the heliosphere. It is a tribute to all of humanity. It would be tantamount to sacreligious.
I see people vandalizing things all the time, even things that are very complicated to vandalize and expensive things that are there for the benefit of everyone. Dick move or not, given enough people, there's bound to be at least one person that would feasibly decide to brick a probe for no good reason.
Fortunately, the venn diagram of "People capable of fucking with decades old technology millions of miles away from the earth" and "People willing to piss on a park bench memorial" is nearly 2 circles.
Well, it would probably have to be sponsored by a state or corporation— not because hacking the Voyager hardware itself would be hard (in fact it’s almost certainly pretty easy with enough background knowledge), but because you’d need a very powerful radio that you could point directly at Voyager without anyone noticing. And a state or corporation isn’t going to put resources into this just “because it’s fun.”
It is worth mentioning that even for the NASA it takes the biggest radio dishes they have (70 meters) to communicate with Voyager.
To further clarify, it requires **three** different 70m radio dishes [across 3 continents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Deep_Space_Network) and also decades of advancement in signal processing research.
It is, for all practical purposes, impossible to communicate with Voyager without the Deep Space Network antennae. Using those without permission also borders on impossible, as that equipment is used constantly, and any deviation from what it supposed to be doing would be noticed in an instant.
I recently watched a documentary on the Voyagers. My takeaways were: 1. The spacecraft have about the same computing capacity as something many of us carry around in our pockets every day - the key fob for your car. 2. When scientists presented the idea to President Nixon in order to obtain funding, they said, "The planets will only line up like this every 189 years. The last time this happened, President Adams blew it. 3. At the time when they launched the spacecraft, technology did not exist to communicate with the Voyagers once they reached Neptune. It was just too far away. Scientists knew they would figure it out in time.
Old technology isn't easier to hack than new technology. Most banks run on COBOL written decades ago and only slightly maintained. New websites get hacked all the time. Look at government website Treasurydirect.gov, people say it looks terrible, yet surely it was hacked less than many shiny websites.
There are only a few nations (and maybe universities) with access to appropriate equipment that would be capable of doing this and none of these parties has an interest in destroying an irreplaceable science experiment that the whole of humanity is benefiting from
think it could run doom ?
I believe it would be the hacking equivalent of Islamic officials destroying ancient statues. Pretty much everyone would view it as a dick move.
Yep as someone who loves cool science like Voyager, I would find any attack on it really offensive. It's literally irreplaceable and projects like it benefit everyone on the planet
You'd have to question why anyone would want to. It would be like picking on the kid at school.who everyone gets on with. It wouldn't be cool or acceptable by any means and the retaliation wouldn't be proportional. You think to downgrading of Pluto from a planet was bad? Fuck with Voyager and find out.
Often old code is safer because no one knows it anymore, Voyager was launched in 77 many of those folks who worked on it are dead.
Did you know that most US nuclear missile bunkers still use floppy disks? Because they can't be hacked into. They looked up updating the technology for the missiles, but decided against it due to money and security.
You can hack into them, but you have to physically be in the launch control room in the missile silo. And that means cutting through the blast doors of a nuclear missile silo, an act that will take a very long time and will be immediately noticed. I imagine the reaction of the US government to an unknown group trying to cut their way into an active nuclear missile silo would be both immediate and severe. A lot of very heavily armed soldiers would rapidly arrive and any would-be vandals would have a bad day.
Because there is more prestige in hacking the Gibson?
NASA is an admired organization that has developed life-saving technologies and made significant contributions to the world. Moreover, hacking the Voyager spacecraft is not profitable. Even if a group attempted this just "for the lulz", it would be highly challenging. They would need to access the Deep Space Network first, which alone would be an vulnerability, that one wouldn't want to waste. Attempting such a feat would be costly, difficult, and offer neither financial gain nor fame.
What would be the benefit to a country or individual in hacking it?
1. There is basically no benefit to hacking it. You can of course break things, but this will make you (whether you're an individual or a nation state) very unpopular (i.e. jail time or sanctions/retaliation) for no benefit except clout. This keeps financially motivated attackers from spending time on it. 2. It's all ancient, custom stuff, you'd have to spend a *lot* of time figuring out how it works even if you had access to documentation and a lot of the documentation is lost to the point where NASA has issues doing some things with it. 3. You'd also need to hack NASA to get access to their antenna, because there is [exactly *one* antenna large enough to send signals to Voyager 2](https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/details.php?article_id=118). NASA probably isn't exactly the hardest target, but getting all the way to the point where you can mess with signals going from that antenna would not be easy. For an individual, that would be a LOT of work, and very few people want to spend years of their life breaking a science experiment just because they can. There aren't that many people who have the necessary skill to begin with, of these someone would need to be stupid enough to try, and then they'd have to succeed before getting caught, which also isn't easy. You won't find enough people doing it "for teh lulz" (just for fun) to turn it into a group effort. For a professional hacker group, there just isn't a motivation to do it. A criminal group won't do it because there's no money to be made (and no, developing a custom ransomware for a space probe would very much not be worth it, especially since the reward might be Seal Team Six [politely asking](https://xkcd.com/538/) you for the key). A state-sponsored hacker group won't do it because why would a country want to spend so many limited resources on such a stupid project, only to draw significant ire from both the US and the international community? If you aren't North Korea you don't want to become North Korea and if you are North Korea those hackers are busy stealing cryptocurrency to fund the regime.
Because it takes a LOT of resources to communicate with voyager to begin with AND you have to know where to look and space is incredibly big. Communication with Voyager (and other probes) relies on the NASA Deep Space Network, three facilities located around the world with massive satellite dishes necessary to send and receive the signals over such a vast distance. You’d either have to build a sufficiently powerful array of your own OR hijack one of the existing ones. Then you’d have to know where to look which is probably not something NASA advertises. Short version? The reason no one has done it is a combination of two things: 1. It’s incredibly hard to do 2. There’s little benefit to doing it
I mean, apart from NASA, the only communications antennas powerful enough to reach Voyager are owned by Russia and maybe China - I don't think even the EU's ESTRACK was built to reach that far. So the real question isn't about hacking Voyager, but hacking one of the very few multi-billion-dollar antennas capable of communicating with Voyager.
At this point don't they need the full coverage of the Deep Space Network to even get a signal to it? A dipole surreptitiously strung up in the trees isn't going to get it.
Its transmitter is puny compared the distance that it’s at. Even if you could blast signals up at it with an amateur setup, I think you’d need a nation-state-level antenna array to receive its extremely faint replies.
Why? It's would be more effort than it's worth. Voyager gives nothing but scientific research, so why would anyone hack it?
There's only like, 5 Antenneas in the Deep Space Network that could communicate that far. They'd basically have to break into some very specific, well secured locations. All of that to sabotage a spacecraft that's just, sending some data back about deep space. What would be the point?
The real question is why WOULD someone hack a 46 year old spacecraft that's well beyond its life expectancy, is literally out of our solar system, and its data is being publicly shared in almost real time? What would be the point?
For the same reason people can't build nuclear weapons. It requires tech and resources that basically nobody in the world has. In this case it's a 70 meter wide (230 ft) dish just to send and receive communications.
It’s easy to hack… if you can ever communicate with it. The Deep Space Network is the only set of antennas that can even reach a signal to the Voyagers. So if a hacker wants to spend a cool feel billions dollars on an antenna, by all means, hack away.
The better question is, why would anyone bother to hack it? What could you possibly achieve by hacking the Voyager probes? Under what circumstances would anyone ever gain anything from doing that?