- Decoding the Artemis I Orion vehicle
On Wednesday 16th, the Artemis I mission was launched from Kennedy Space Center. This mission is the first (uncrewed) flight of the Orion Multi-Purpuse Crew Vehicle that will be used to return humans to the Moon in the next few years. Together with Orion, ten cubesats with missions to the Moon and beyond were also launched.
Seven hours after launch, I used two spare antennas from the Allen Telescope Array to record RF signals from Orion and some of the cubesats. By that time, the spacecraft were at a distance of 72000 km, increasing to 100000 km during the 3 hours that the observations lasted.
I have collected a lot of data on those observations, around 1.7 TB of IQ recordings. I am going to classify and reduce this data, with the goal of publishing it on Zenodo. Given the large amount of data, this will take some time. I will keep posting in this blog updates on this progress, as well as my results of the analysis of these signals.
Today’s post is about Orion’s S-band main telemetry signal, which is transmitted at 2216.5 MHz. This signal has attracted great interest in the spacecraft tracking community because back in August NASA published an RFI giving the opportunity to ground stations belonging to private companies, research institutions, amateur associations and private individuals to track the S-band signal and provide Doppler data to NASA. Some of the usual contributors of the amateur space tracking community, including Dwingeloo’s CAMRAS (see their results webpage), Scott Chapman K4KDR and Scott Tilley VE7TIL (see his Github repository) are participating in this project.
Shortly after Artemis I launched, Amateur observers in Europe, such as Paul Marsh M0EYT, the Dwingeloo 25m radiotelescope, Ferruccio Andrea IW1DTU, Roland Proesch DF3LZ, were the first to receive the signals. They were then followed by those in America.
- Using GSE and DVB-S2 for IP traffic
GSE (Generic Stream Encapsulation) is a protocol used to embed packets of almost any sort into the DVB data link layer. It can be used to send IP (IPv4 and IPv6) packets, Ethernet packets, etc. In my post about Blockstream Satellite, I talked about MPE, which is another way of sending IP traffic inside DVB. However, MPE is based on MPEG TS packets, so it is a far from ideal solution, given the overhead of the TS headers and the relatively small size of TS packets. GSE is a much more lightweight solution, and it’s arguably the best way of sending IP packets inside DVB.
The downside of GSE compared to MPE is that it is not supported by so many devices. Since MPE uses TS packets, it should be supported by mostly any device. The formatting of the TS packets, and thus all of the MPE stack, is handled at the application level. However, GSE is different from a stream of TS packets already the level of BBFRAMEs, so devices that handle this layer need to support GSE.
In this post I show how to set up a DVB-S2 GSE one-way link using the GNU Radio out-of-tree module gr-dvbgse and an SDR for transmission, and a MiniTiouner, Longmynd and some software I’ve written for reception.
The MiniTiouner is a DVB-S2 hardware receiver that is based on a Serit FTS4334 NIM (which uses the STV0910 DVB-S2 demodulator IC) together with a FT2232H that provides a USB2 interface for data and control. It is a very popular device within the Amateur TV community, given its affordable price and large range of supported carrier frequencies, symbol rates, and MODCODs.
The ideas in this post are also applicable to an SDR demodulation approach, which could use gr-dvbs2rx and gr-dvbgse. Using a hardware receiver solution can give some benefits over an SDR receiver, since demodulation and LDPC decoding is computationally expensive, specially at higher symbol rates and in low SNR conditions.
My final goal for this is to do some tests of two-way IP links over the QO-100 WB transponder. I think this would be a rather interesting use of the transponder, since it would open the door to many new ideas. Currently the transponder is used almost exclusively to transmit video, which by all means is good, but not very innovative after the almost 4 years now that the transponder has been in operation.
I have to give huge thanks to Brian Jordan G4EWJ and Evariste Courjard F5OEO for their interest in this project and for running many initial tests that showed that it is possible to use the MiniTiouner to receive GSE (despite the lack of clear and detailed documentation about the STV0910 register settings).
- Decoding INTEGRAL
INTEGRAL, the INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory, is a gamma ray space telescope from ESA that was launched in 2002. It is on a highly elliptical Earth orbit, and uses S-band for communications (see this page).
Yesterday, Scott Tilley VE7TIL shared on Twitter a short 30 second recording of the INTEGRAL downlink at 2215 MHz. Since I’ve never had a look at this spacecraft, I decided to try to decode the data. This post is an overview of what I’ve found about the INTEGRAL S-band downlink.
- Decoding the BlueWalker 3 S-band downlink
BlueWalker 3 is a satellite built by AST SpaceMobile that was launched in 2022-09-11. It is as a prototype mission that will try to communicate from low Earth orbit with unmodified cellphones on ground using a large 64 m² unfoldable phased array antenna. It has received some criticism because of concerns of the satellite being too bright due to the large antenna (impacting astronomy observations) and potentially causing RF interference to radioastronomy and other services, since the cellular bands it will use are normally used only in terrestrial applications.
It also received criticism when shortly after launch, amateur radio operators noticed that the satellite was transmitting packets on 437.500 MHz, in the UHF amateur satellite band. The mission of this satellite is not compatible with the amateur radio service and it hasn’t received IARU coordination. There were some arguments on Twitter about whether BlueWalker 3 actually had the proper experimental license from the FCC to do this or not, and people posted ITU SNL filings and FCC applications. I didn’t track all of this in detail, so I don’t have a well informed opinion about whether BlueWalker 3 is following the regulations correctly.
A month ago, I looked at the UHF packets and checked that BlueWalker 3 used exactly the same modulation and coding as Light-1, which is a 3U cubesat from United Arab Emirates (this was first discovered by Tetsurou Satou JA0CAW). The framing contains the typical elements of the built-in packet handler of low cost FSK chips such as the Texas Instruments CC11xx family. Scott Tilley noticed some details that seem to explain this connection: Light-1 was built by NanoAvionics, which apparently has collaborated with AST SpaceMobile in the BlueWalker 3 mission. Therefore, it seems that the satellite bus used by BlueWalker 3 is that of a typical cubesat.
BlueWalker 3 also transmits in S-band, at a frequency of 2245 MHz. Scott Tilley has been doing some observations of this signal and sharing some recordings. Aang254 has been analysing the signal and remarks that it’s mostly idle data. In this post I’ll do an analysis of the BlueWalker 3 S-band signal using two recordings made by Scott.
- Blockstream Satellite: decoding Bitcoin transactions
In my previous post I wrote about the protocols used by Blockstream Satellite. This was motivated by a challenge in GRCon22’s CTF. In that challenge, muad’dib sent the flag as a Blockstream API message and recorded the Blockstream Satellite DVB-S2 downlink as the message was broadcast. The recording was used as the IQ file for the challenge.
In my post, I gave a look at how all the protocol stack for the Blockstream API works: DVB-S2, MPE, IPv4, UDP, plus a custom protocol that supports fragmentation and application-level FEC. However, I didn’t give any details about how the protocols used to broadcast the Bitcoin blockchain work. This runs on another UDP port, independently of the Blockstream API. At that time I didn’t understand much about it, even though during the CTF I was trying to search for the flag in a Bitcoin transaction and looking at the source code of bitcoinsatellite to try to figure out how it worked.
After my previous post, Igor Freire commented some details of the FEC used in bitcoinsatellite. This is quite interesting by itself. Two FEC libraries by Chris Taylor are used: the Wirehair O(N) fountain code for larger blocks, and the CM256 MDS code based on Cauchy matrices over GF(256) (this is very similar to Reed-Solomon used as erasure coding). This motivated me to continue studying how all this works.
Now I have been able decode the Bitcoin transactions in the CTF recording. These don’t use any FEC, since transactions are small. I believe that there aren’t any blocks fully contained in the 35 second recording, so to see how the FEC codes work (which could be quite interesting) I would need a longer recording.
In this post I’ll show how to decode the Bitcoin transaction in Blockstream Satellite. The materials can be found in this repository.
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