Off-Nominal - 51 - Hubbles In Reverse

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

Scott Tilley, an amateur satellite tracker, joins Jake and Anthony to talk about tracking Chang’e-5 back to the Moon and into a Distant Retrograde Orbit, how he and the wider community of amateur satellite trackers do what they do, and what else he’s been tracking lately.DrinksLemon Drop Cocktail RecipePhiladelphia Pale Ale - Yards Brewing Co. - UntappdTopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 51 - Hubbles In Reverse (with Scott Tilley) - YouTubeMeet the Amateur Astronomer Who Found a Lost NASA Satellite | Freethink - YouTubeChang’e 5 Returns to the Moon – Riddles in the SkyChang’e 4 Lunar Orbit a Postmortem – Riddles in the SkyA Chinese spacecraft is testing out a new orbit around the moon - SpaceNewsGreat Red Spot | WeMartians ShopFollow Scott TilleyScott Tilley 🇺🇦 (@coastal8049) / TwitterRiddles in the Sky – A blog dedicated to observing, mostly classified, satellites.Follow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Hello, everyone. Hi, I'm buddy. Hi, I'm letting you. Cutoff 51. The second of, wait, did I say that? Off nominal, 51. I just finished the other show, Jake.

See, we're already off, we're already off the rail. This is like a record, like three seconds into the show, and it's wrong already. That's the wrong podcast. So, yeah, we're living up to our teaching. They're here. We did bring a great, very topical friend with us today, Scott Tilly. Not the, not the Scott Tilly that I played hockey with. for about 15 years growing up and into beer league hockey.

But the man who tracks any satellite that you put into orbit, Scott, how you doing? Not too bad. Thanks for having me. Yeah, well, we're pretty excited about it. I don't know. I think we've been following you on Twitter for a while. I think it's been at least a few years just seeing some of the stuff you've been up to. So we finally made some changes the show and opened up this schedule.

So we have lots more opportunity to talk to interesting people. and so we're really glad to be able to have this chance to hang out. And I think you're calling it from Jake's old stomping grounds, right? You're in BC. That's right. Yeah, sunshine coast to British Columbia. Nice. How's the weather there today?

Today it's starting to clear up. The clouds are breaking up. The forecast is some cool evenings, some good clear skies for satellite observing, and some nice sunny days around 10 degrees. So our spring is sprung. That's awesome. That's excellent. Jake moved to Mexico, so he's just trying to stunt on you.

I'm not, I'm really not. I was just going to say, I was like so delighted when you connected to the call and you started talking because I haven't heard like a Canadian accent besides my wife for like a long time. And so I was like, oh, my people are here. Just a little bit of home today. Yeah, it's a little bit of home today. Did you bring anything fun to drink, Scott? I know it's early because of our time slot here.

I just finished my morning coffee here. Some dramas occurred last night and I didn't get a very good night's sleep, so, but everything's all good. Still caffeinating. All right, good. Still caffeinating here. Jake, you got something. Did you go to the beer company? I did not. No, I made a cocktail today. So, okay, so this is like a weird, weird thing. But bizarrely, one of the things that's, like, difficult to find down here, for some reason, I've had trouble finding lemons or, like, lemon products, like lemon juice, anything lemon. it's been like bizarre.

There's limes as far as the eye can see. This is pretty weird. Consider your climate. That is weird. Yeah. But I finally went to this grocery store and they had both lemons and lemon juice. So I'm celebrating with like the most lemony cocktail I could ever come up with. Wow, that's like bright yellow.

Yeah. So this is, it's just like, it's like it's called lemon drop. It's just like lemon vodka and lemon juice and, uh, I think there's some orange liqueur in here and some sugar and stuff. So anyway, I'm having it's just like, it's like, it's just like lemon vodka and lemon juice. So anyway, I'm having it's just like, it's just like, it's just like, it's like, a lemon day. I'm very excited about it. You're finding lemons. I found a lemon. I'm so excited.

Oh, man. Well, it's been a week here. So I have a total bog standard Philadelphia pale ale that I've probably drank a thousand times here on the show. It's nice bright yellow bottle. Just drinkable. It's lemon colored. All right. Where do we want to start, Jake? Because there's, I think we should start with the fact that.

that Scott was on a hunt for Zuma a couple years ago. I mean, there's no more appropriate, phenomenal start to talking about Zuma, I think. All right. We need, so there was, the reason we're bringing this up is that Freethink did this video with you a couple years ago of when you found, what was this grace?

Is this grace? Is my memory shot? Image, right? Image, I don't know. I picked the five letter. Why am I not in this shot? This is weird. I'll work on that.

But just imagine I'm in the top right of the screen right now. You were trying to find Zuma. What was that about? Where does your theory on Zuma? Where did it go? I really don't have a theory. We just have some loose bits of evidence. There was a pilot that grabbed a picture of something obviously venting fuel over Africa.

And then all of the subterfuge became about the... Zuma had failed, it didn't detach, and burned up in the atmosphere with the final stage of the booster. Being a little bit skeptical, I started a radio search because we didn't expect, well, the orbit that it probably would have entered would not have been visible in the northern latitudes. So we couldn't do an optical search. So the next best step was to start to sweep the known frequency bands that the U.S. military uses. and hope that we come up with something, a Doppler curve or something like that that's unknown to us. So I started that and a few days into it.

It's a long convoluted process of, you know, recording data 24-7, then hours and hours and hours of sifting through that data looking for stuff that you haven't seen before. And that's when I noticed this weird Doppler curve for something I knew immediately wasn't probably coming from Zoom because of the shape of the curve and everything else that it was in a totally different class of orbit. And used a piece of software that a colleague of mine in the Netherlands created

to basically auto-identify the Doppler curve once I had enough data, and it came back as image. And initially, I didn't pay it much mind. I just logged it, made a note of my notebook to kind of look at what that mission was because I hadn't seen it before. And I went on about scanning my data. And then later that night, it was on the weekend or something like that, I probably had a couple of cocktails myself and started going through the review of my list.

Because one of the things that I like to do is when I observe stuff, I write a list down of the different objects. And if I haven't seen them before, I interacted with them before, I like looking up their history. Like, what was that all about? And so I punched in, you know, image satellite and up come some information. And what's stuck out to me right away is everybody's talking about it in the past. tense. And that kind of twigged me and I said, okay, then I found a reference to it. It failed. And I'm like, well, it doesn't look failed to me. There's quite a strong carrier and there's data sidebands and everything else. So it's either I've misidentified it or something is up here.

So at that point, I'd had a couple of days where the data, and it was clear to me that the data was correctly coming back and being correctly identified, the fit was just too good. And, you know, if you have one period of Doppler, like one day's worth or a short snippet, you don't usually have enough to get 100% confirmation of what you're seeing. But once you start to get a long arc or a long duration of data, then boom, it starts to become pretty telling. It starts to eliminate the fact that it could be multiple other things until it gets to the point where it's just unique. So at that point, that's when I discovered. on a NASA failure report. NASA has this wonderful habit of, you know, talking about its success,

but also talking about its failure publicly. And in that report, they in great, gory detail, articulated what they thought happened to image and how they expected it to come back. And the theory was just that... Is this the report, this very official looking PDF? Probably, yeah. And it's got lots of like circuit diagrams in it. And it's, It's very magical reading. I'm looking at the scroll bar. I'm a little intimidated by that scroll bar. Yeah, you definitely don't want to be drinking a cocktail reading that.

Or maybe you do. So anyways, if you get, or maybe you do. So anyways, once you get to the bottom of it, and they're talking about, you know, strategies about how to recover image because they thought image was worthy of recovering and putting energy into it. So they hypothesized that eventually the battery would get low enough during an eclipse that it might reset the satellite.

And they were right. Just their time frame and their patience had worn out. And they gave up, obviously, because they've got better things to do with the brilliant minds down in NASA than to look for something that died in space for 10 years, 13 years, or whatever it was. So when I encountered it,

then my colleague in the Netherlands, he started digging through his data, and lo and behold, there it was in his data as well. Once we knew what we were looking for, you know, it's like a needle in the haystack. Once you know exactly where the needle is in the haystack, boom, it becomes pretty easy to find it in older data. So as it turned out, you know, the satellite wasn't able to be recovered, but, you know, it was a good exercise in, you know, identifying something in space that has come back to us and then figuring out what it is. And then potentially attempting to re-contact it and maybe even reuse it. And that was NASA's intent initially.

It was like there was enough positivity in the initial data that they got that it was worthy of an attempt to re-establish communications with and try to figure out what's going on with it. Unfortunately, image was not in the greatest health. It's batteries dead. It totally relies on solar panels. And obviously, whatever probably caused it to malfunction is manifested into more issues for it. It wasn't able to reliably hear commands. it did initially, from what I understand, accept a few commands,

but later it degraded. And then it started switching itself on and off, on and off, on and off, and started to repeat the cycle. We were able to see that as it went through eclipses, it would reboot at times. And just recently, it's in an eclipse season right now, just coming to an end.

And I have tracked it a few times, and it hasn't come on this season. But it's also a very different orientation. if it's orbit, it's now predominantly favoring apogies down in the southern hemisphere. So we only see it near Perigee up here. Okay. So anyways, yeah, that's the overly gory details of image. Well, I like to start at this story because I feel like it's such a good overview of like

what you're getting up to with all this. And I would like to now unpack because there's so many angles. There's so many levels of nerdiness and what you do that it's because you have to understand like communications gear. then you have to understand like orbital mechanics. And, you know, when you're tracking something like Zuma, you're kind of predicting what you might see. And there's just so many, like, interesting things to get lost in.

But how did you, which of these things was where you started? Did you start with, like, being a communications nerd? Or did you start being a space nerd and back into the other one? Where did it begin? It began when I was a kid, a teenager. Well, not even a teenager. I think it was 12 or something at the time. My dad's an amateur radio operator.

And two things happened. There was a space shuttle mission that had an amateur radio SST transmitter on it back in the early 80s, the first one that they did. My dad in the amateur radio club built a little antenna in the backyard of one of his buddies's place to track it. And lo and behold, my dad was sitting in the radio shack, and this picture of the aft end of the space shuttle appeared on his computer monitor, this old 1980s computer. You can just imagine how sexy that was. But it really captured me. And the other thing that captured me at the time where there was a 60 Minutes episode

on the Kitterin group in England, like a boys' school over there that was tracking the Soviet space program in 1960s, 70s, and 80s. And they discussed how they monitored the Soviet space program with short wave. And that intrigued me. It was just kind of like, you know,

I silently looked at my dad and then looked up at his radios and waited for him to go to work and would sneak into his radio shack and turn on the radios and try to figure out how to hear the Soviet space program. And it took me a couple of years and I was able to finally hear my first Soviet satellite. And from there, you know, just going to the library in my high school and whatnot and looking at books, learning about astronomy. It wasn't really a focused attempt. As is a lot of what I do right now, you know, it's focused, but it's more about learning and self-education.

And as you do the stuff, you start learning more and more about it. Like, I didn't really know a lot about orbits until you really start looking at satellites and then collecting data to help others generate orbital information. And then over time, it all just starts to sink in, you know, what they're talking about and what they're waving their hands about. And, you know, reading these, you know, obscure email reflector posts and slowly starting to figure it out over time. and then developing the skills yourself and utilizing all the other skills that you have, like radio skills and astronomy skills, mathematics skills, research skills, that's the biggest one probably is the ability to research and find information and then putting it all together. And the other side of it is collaboration.

And that's kind of the black art of it all, what is I'm really discovering. I'm pulling up this video from Freethink because I love this scene when you climb onto your roof and there's this incredible tracking system that you have with like cameras strapped to this thing got antennas on here did you home build that and I would like some story time about building this epic rig out how do you control it? Building it is kind of like a building it is kind of that is probably the bottom of the basement satellite tracking system that you could possibly come up with. If you look back in 1980s amateur radio handbook, you know, they're talking about how to repurpose

TV rotors and stuff like that to do things. And that's what that is. I've since upgraded it a bit. But again, it's very amateur. It's very kind of like, you know, this is just what you need to do this job and not much more, not much less. And, you know, the real takeaway from all of this is that, you know, with such simple equipment and such simple things, you know, you can monitor such, you know, distant things going on, which kind of implies that what's the point and try to keep all that stuff up there secret? And, you know, a great amounts of treasure and confidence in governments can be lost by trying to hide and conceal things that are just obvious in plain sight for anybody that's

patient enough to look. And so essentially that stuff you see in my roof, it's just, yeah, it's literally stuff that you can either get out of a lot that, you know, some of the antenna rotors came out of the dump. A lot of the wiring cables just cast off stuff, you know, that I've collected over the years in a pile in the back, you know, and, you know, you just keep putting the stuff together, trying to keep the cost as low as possible. And it's all highly experimental. every time something new or interesting comes along, you're rearranging stuff to make it work in a new radio band or do whatever you want it to do.

So you're scouring eBay looking for bits and pieces and all that kind of stuff. The eBay satellite tracking setup. It's pretty much anything you need is on eBay. They scare some people in organizations that are concerned about security and everything else. And I wouldn't say that, you know, they should be scared. They just need to take certain precautions to prevent, you know, certain bad things from happening.

So, yeah. Well, I mean, I've heard some stories of legacy space hardware that's like, you know, in use, in real applications and real satellites or vehicles or ground stations right now where they've had to source parts on eBay because they don't make them anymore. So it's not too far off from the actual professional world. Yeah, you're pointing eBay hardware and other eBay hardware for sure. sure sometimes. You're bidding against some people with really big companies, I think. And the other thing I find is, too, as you get into, amateur radio is a very interesting hobby in that sense.

As you kind of start to do stuff in amateur radio and get attention in it, or even express an interest, other amateurs tend to transport junk in your direction and that could be potentially helpful. And there was a wonderful chap that I had met. giving a presentation down at Stanford University after the image recovery. He was attending this. It was the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers, a yearly conference. And they kindly invited me to come down and give this presentation.

And I met this chap. His name was Dusty. And he was an amateur here in southern BC. And we got to be really good friends. We started corresponding a lot, sharing information. he in his previous life, his working life, had actually been part of the military industrial complex. And all he could do is smile in a lot of our discussions.

He's your handler, Scott. He's not your friend. He's your handler. They're like, you don't keep an eye on Scott. Well, it's actually, it's sadder than that, in the sense that Rusty developed cancer and he passed away about a year and a half after we became friends. and his daughter reached out to me saying that he had, along with a group of other like-minded

amateurs, he had left his entire radio station and equipment to us. And he had organized his affairs in such a way that, you know, he had this egalitarian way of disseminating his equipment, and he had a whole process. And he particularly wanted certain things to go in my direction. And the same with other people that were doing things. That is awesome. That's just the amateur spirit. Did he leave you any riddles about, about, like, stuff that he didn't want to tell you about in life?

I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that, but it was just kind of like, point in this direction. You would go in his radio shack, and it's certainly, there's quite a few key pieces of equipment that are sitting here that I'm looking at right now. I'm under the desk and stuff like that, that he left behind that have become critical to what I'm doing. And so it's mentors and supporters and people like that that, you know, know, and that's really the amateur radio spirit, really, is to encourage experimentation, you know, and learning. And in a certain sense, I believe Rusty was, he believed in a lot of the similar things I did. He didn't really speak about politics and he didn't really speak about, you know, his thoughts on the military or anything like that and satellites in general.

but he obviously was a like-minded soul. There's like a whole community online too, right? There's a couple of people I follow. I don't know who UHF Satcom is. I'm sure you do because he both are always chatting on Twitter. Marco Langbroek, I don't know how to say his name in particular, but something like that. And it's always fun when there's an NRO launch

or something that you don't know about. And like before the launch happens, the triangulation that happens, where it's like, well, here's the no-tams that are going up, and here's what we think it's shaped like this, because it's going to this vehicle, it's going to that orbit, the other ones were like this, and you are able to figure out the intent of so many of these missions, whether or not, you know, any details are given. There's some that are still mysteries, newer versions of, you know, satellites or a new constellation goes up, but how did that community

develop? Was this something that goes back to, like, you know, the Bolton board system days, or where did that online community come from that has sprouted up around it? Yeah, it does. It goes back into the 1960s. It goes right back to the beginning of the space age. And, you know, amateurs were called upon, you know, right from the first moments of Sputnik to provide, you know, reports on positions of satellites in space and, et cetera.

And as the space race accelerated and there wasn't very much transparency, from the Russia's and to some degree not very much transparency from the West either. There was a good reason for people to be looking up and reporting. And as time went on, things kind of calmed down a bit. And things seemed to be getting fairly transparent in the 70s. There was some detent going on with obviously the Apollo Soyes. And the space race after the moon landings and everything else seemed to be kind of mellowing out. know there was some militarization with the Russian space stations that they put up with a, you know, a cannon on board and all that kind of stuff.

But generally speaking, things were seemingly kind of calming down. It wasn't until the early 1980s that, you know, this whole kind of intentional classification of objects in space became a reality. And then a whole bunch of very odd missions, stealthy-type missions were created and launched. And, you know, this state that we're in right now really kind of started to exist. And we've seen some major policy decisions and changes in the United States with respect to transparency in the use of space over the last few years, you know, that have kind of opened up a lot of the orbital elements for objects that were previously classified, but still some remain in classified orbits. And what I mean by that, they're not being publicly shared by official channels.

The only way we know anything about them is by looking, documenting, and generating our own orbits for it. A lot of those are moving around, too. They're doing, like, changes to their orbit to try and, I guess, to throw you guys off is what I assume. I think I, maybe I highly doubt that, you know. Yeah. Yeah, again, yeah, like a lot of, like, the bigger optical surveillance satellites, you know, these basically, I would presume they're just a Hubble in reverse. You know, they're in relatively low orbits. They skim down fairly low at their parogees.

So they do encounter drag, and they do require orbital maintenance. You've got a satellite that's worth more than an aircraft carrier. You're going to take care of the thing. I never really put in those words before, but holy shit. Yeah. So these are significant national security assets to the West, and probably there's a small army. of really competent people maintaining them.

And, you know, I don't think they're really intentionally maneuvering them to throw everybody off course about what they're doing. They're maneuvering them to, one, maintain their orbits and two, to make sure that the constellation of those spacecraft remain usable to them. And they may change their mission profiles, too, slightly, what they want to look at and how they want to look at things. You know, other military satellites, once they get into a certain orbit, there's minimal orbital maintenance.

They just plug along, and that's what they do. But generally, you can tell what their missions. In the movies, they always say, like, we got to get a picture here. The satellite is en route, and they're like, yeah. Yeah. You got to remember that the gas in one of those things, the fuel, is finite. It's not like they have a refueling tanker that will come up to it and top it back up. When it runs out of gas, they got to deorbit it.

And I imagine there's been some hard discussions about that when you have hardware, because U.S. satellites, just from my zombie satellite hunting, U.S. satellites have this propensity to want to just keep going. And there's stuff from the 1960s that's still squawking away in a semi-usible way. So you can just imagine a lot of these satellites are probably still functional, and they're just getting low on gas, and they're having to terminate their missions simply because of that. So talking about like transparency and stuff, I wonder if we can talk a little bit about the Chinese missions because this is this is like this sounds like what everything you just described is like the same for Chinese except it's like hard mode because they probably don't publish anything for you to dig up the way NASA would.

So so you've done this this work with the Changa 5 service module I guess is what it's called. So this is the mission that landed. It got the samples that came back, dropped the samples off. back at Earth, but some little piece of it kept going. They fired the thrusters, put it into a whole bunch of different orbits. It's been kind of like making a tour of the Sys Lunar, like the Earth moon system. They went to like L1 and then it's wandered back since. Yeah, yeah. It's like all over the place.

So can you talk a little bit about, well, first, you know, why hunt this, what's your interest in it? And then also just what is different about tracking Chinese assets and what is the extra challenge to that? Actually, the Chinese space program up until recently, it's been very very. fairly transparent. There's lots of Chinese and Chinese language speakers that are monitoring the program over there and that share a lot of information in the public realm. I don't think there's anything really going on in the Chinese space program that I've been able to see that's any more, you know, any different than really what's going on in the West. There's obviously

a great volume of spacecraft going up. But I think that's just indicative of, of, of, of, uh, the Chinese space program developing. They obviously have a lot of different purposes for it, civilian, military, you know, etc., etc. I wouldn't say it's any more challenging than monitoring anything in the West. It might become that way if we become, if China really closes off,

its information flow, and we have seen evidence of that over the last six months or so where there have been some public websites and stuff like that. It had supplied, information openly online have been shut down over there. But I'm hoping that, you know, that information flow continues. The reason why I'm interested in the lunar missions is not so much because they're Chinese.

It's just because they're lunar missions. They're just stuff that's out going out into space that, you know, there isn't a lot of, you know, independent tracking. So when you log into spacetrack.org and want to get an orbital element for something that's going to the moon, you're likely going to get, you know, maybe a TLE or two when it was really near the Earth, and that data is going to be useless for tracking. So if you really want to track it and listen to its radio signal, you've got to find it. And, you know, and then once you find it, how do you keep track of it,

especially if you don't understand what's going on? So you need to learn a little bit about orbital dynamics and, you know, just how all that works. And, you know, there's a bunch of really smart people, that are out there that are kind of on the fringes of what I would call the amateur community that have created some pretty awesome tools and software. And there are, that NASA itself has created GMAT General Mission Analysis tool,

which is publicly available, which allows you to track objects in deep space and model state vectors and everything else. So all this stuff is available. It's just a matter of putting in enough time and having some data that you can actually plug into the things and start to teach yourself some of the skills. And that's essentially what I've done. It started with the Changin 5, T1,

and the lunar reconnaissance orbiter. I did something kind of crazy. That little dish you saw in the video there, I told it to track the moon for an entire month and listened to the lunar reconnaissance orbiter. And it drove my wife crazy because this thing's clicking and buzzing for like, you know, hours and hours a day. I was going to ask like, you know, what this is like when it's operating. Yeah, that particular system has been upgraded to something more quiet. Let's put it that way. Anyways, I ended up getting this plot of the Doppler curve of the lunar reconnaissance

orbiter in the moon. And immediately, I learned something fundamental about orbits. And you could see that the Doppler, the amplitude of the Doppler frequency change was changing with the orientation of the orbital plane of the spacecraft. And I was able to tell the period of the orbit. I was able to use the physics behind it to calculate its nominal orbital altitude and all the little basic parameters of LRO's orbit. Obviously it's a public orbit. You can go onto their website and they'll give you a picture of where it is right now.

But when you can actually go and independently verify and confirm that against something that's correct and see and learn about the trajectory. and learn about the orbit and what you can learn from it, it becomes pretty cool. And then the next stage was China launched the T1 mission to test the return capsule for the Chengen 5 mission we just saw complete. And they had an S-band transponder, and I was able to monitor that as it went out to the Earth Moon L2 point, and then returned back to the Moon, and then for years monitored the T1 orbiter as it remained in orbit around the Moon. and I believe based on some papers that I read that it was doing like a gravity model. I was generating data for the Chinese to get a better understanding of the mass cons and gravity of the moon.

You need that in the moon. Yeah, exactly. So a great reuse of this mission, a totally peaceful purpose. And from what I understand, I would assume that data has probably been released into the public domain. Maybe somebody on Twitter could let me know otherwise or even point me towards it. I'd be interested. But yeah, it's, you know, and then as the actual moon sample return mission came up, in typical Chinese space mission or they don't like this, they don't say a lot.

They just, there's the propaganda part of it. It's like, you know, we're going to go and get this, you know, samples and bring it back, but they don't give you a lot of details. Where NASA, on the other hand, there would be this huge public release of information that, you know, giving you each, you know, what they'd plan to do in each second of the mission and, you know, even maybe even state vectors and you could go to JPL Horizons and download the latest, you know, data, know exactly where the mission is. And when it's, the information's a minute out of date, everybody's crying and hewing on social media that, you know, that, you know, there's something

wrong here. But the Chinese space program creates that different challenge where you need to kind of piece the mission together. together. You know, and that comes with, you know, stumbling over things, listening to people that are sharing information out of China and actually just looking at the mission and just kind of reverse engineering it and just looking at, you know, okay, you know, looking at old papers on how we got to the moon with Apollo and other missions and kind of like, okay, so there's only so many ways you can go to the moon and there's, you know, so you start to reverse engineer it and start to see the geometry of. it. The cool thing with the sample return mission is that, you know, the geometry of it all, when the stuff that was leaking out of China, like basically the little pamphlets that I'm sure they created probably for senior political members and figures to basically be sitting in control rooms watching the mission play out, probably to give them like basically kind of like a program if you were going to see a presentation or a play. So those things started to leak out.

they were all geometric and then you could start to reverse engineer that and it's like okay if that's the case and these are the timings then it would have to be this period of an orbit which would limit and if they gave you one little gem of information it's it's it's periloon would be this altitude then you could calculate out what it's you know appelloon would be and then you could start you know figuring out as i gather doppler data what its actual inclination would be and or from the images that they're releasing in their um in their media, be able to kind of divine that by comparing it to what you're modeling on GMAT and start to plug in the other orbital elements until you've got to match to the Doppler data that you were getting. And then basically like, okay. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Uh-oh.

Uh-oh. I might have lost them. We might have lost them. Hold, please. What we tell you about? Oh, you might be back. Is he back? It says that you've muted yourself on my end.

I don't know what happened. Oh. Still muted. We can't hear you. Still muted. I don't know. We need some elevator music. We got the happy hour music.

There we go. Some elevator music. He can run any communication you want. If you want to talk to any satellite, you can do it. But he can't unmute. Here, I'm going to kick you out and then you can come back in and try. Let's see that. We'll get a hard reboot.

Oh, man. It's like, I'm like been in raptured for this conversation so far. I just find it incredible because it's like, it's like crowdsourcing so much nerdiness from people that are tracking data from one side of the earth when the other people can't even see it, you know, it's like, it's just a shocking amount of cross-referencing everything. Yeah. What does it say? All right.

Okay. Am I back? Yeah, we're back. You're back. Awesome. We were just saying, what a crazy. I was talking into the blind, I guess. Yeah, yeah.

The one thing I was just commenting about is like how there's times when you're not able to use your hardware because you're on the wrong side of Earth. So you're collaborating across oceans with people, you know, that are, that have a view of it at any given moment and can give you the data out of that. And then someone else, a third party is actually doing, you know, putting that all together. And it's just like epic crowdsourcing that happens to put any of this data together and and then actually come out with imagery that looks like this, where you can actually see what a spacecraft is doing.

And for this mission in particular, there was that moment where I think you started to, like, alert people that, hey, I think Chong of 5 is getting back to DRO, this distant retrograde orbit, which has not been used before. What was that? How did you, like, discover that that was coming into the mission? Well, to be honest with you, I kind of back when we first saw the mission coming back to the Earth's moon system,

I pondered what purpose would this would be? Like, okay, you know, what would they be doing? And one of the hypotheses that I came up with was they're probably going to target a DRO. Why? Nobody's done it before. And other people are potentially targeting it, i.e. NASA with Artemis, Capstone, etc. So the fact that there was no public statements made made me to feel that when the Chinese have accomplished something with it, that they would probably speak about it. As far as I know, there's been no public comment about the disposition of the service module yet.

But that's kind of where it led, started off. And then it became how do we obtain data that could be released publicly to keep the public informed and also keep continuity? So I'm not going to get into all the details, but there was some dramas. And moving on from the dramas was kind of reconnecting with the amateur community and connecting to people that have unique pieces of equipment for their own hobbies. And one of the chaps, John Luke in Quebec, he tracks weather satellites and other Earth observation science satellites. And he decodes with his own software and his own. hardware these really epic images of the earth and shares them online. To do that requires a very,

very accurately tracked antenna. So you need to precisely know because on X-band, especially with a large antenna, the beam width is very narrow. And so you need to know where your antenna is very accurately and be able to do it very quickly. So I asked John Luke if he would mind peering at Chanjin 5 every day. And or more, if he could, and provide me with a positional update. While he was doing that, I was recording Doppler data. And over time, every day, we just kept plotting it and plotting it and plotting it, and it became clear to me that, yes, we were looking at a DRO.

It wasn't just a hypothetical thing. And then utilizing public domain papers on the orbit type, creating my own orbital model for a DRO, and comparing that to the Doppler started to really, you know, demonstrate it to me. And then finally, we used software used by asteroid hunters to compute the orbit and develop a state vector based on John Luke's position data. And then I used that to generate a range rate information and compared that to the Doppler data and we got an excellent match.

So from that, that's when we were pretty much convinced that it was in a DRO. And then we published our results and our blog post. And then a couple of days later, I noticed that our friends at Space Command posted a TLE on spacetrack.org. And if you take using the TLE in a satellite tracking program would just reveal gibberish. But if you take the initial state vector at the time that the TLE was released, its position in space, its velocities, and blah, blah, blah, you can reverse engineer that from a TLE. And then plug that into GMAT. Lo and behold, you see a DRO.

So I believe that was Space Command's way of saying, yep. You nailed it. And in a subtle way saying we're watching out there too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which also reveals that what's going on beyond geostationary orbit altitudes away from Earth is not really being watched by many. There are some really dedicated near-Earth asteroid observers. They're doing some really great work. I'd really like to amplify that greater,

but I think they prefer to be a little bit more subtle in their public relations approach. But they're doing some really awesome work. There's one chap in particular that's doing amazing work in that community. And I take my hat off to him for that. So there's lots of disciplines kind of coming together here and kind of keeping this kind of stuff.

stuff in the public domain and allowing people to see what's going on. And I think China still hasn't made a statement about what they're doing or why. But I firmly believe that this is a peaceful demonstration of navigation prowness in space. And my hat is tipped to the Chinese engineers and scientists that are pulling this off because it's a complicated mission. I'm sure that spacecraft is a limited amount of fuel left over from its primary mission. And they've just pulled off something that's pretty cool. You know, like on the nerd index, this is pegging a lot, in my opinion.

And there's a bunch of guys over there that deserve a pat on the back for doing something pretty cool. Yeah. So a little shameless self-promotion to it. Next week I have an interview coming out on my podcast, We Martians, with Andrew Jones talking all about space, the Chinese space program. So your name does come up in this conversation talking about exactly this whole thing, tracking the Changa 5 and what interesting things they're doing. I think it's probably peaceful as well, although I will totally, my tinfoil hat conspiracy, if I'm allowed to put that on for one second, was that they were going to go and chase the Capstone mission and see what they were up to. So that was my... But they're going to NRHO, though.

Oh, those are different, aren't they? Yeah, they're going to the gateway one. All right, well, they're prepping for Artemis then. They're going to go and tag it. It's Orion one day. Be like a sweet drone footage of Orion. Yeah. That would certainly make NASA comfortable.

It would be totally awesome. Everyone except NASA would love that. Well, let's be realistic here. Like a DRO, there was a follower of mine on Twitter that rightfully posted. The DROs are, there's a whole family of them. Pretty much there's this, if you get into studying this in great detail, you'll start to realize that there's just this whole family, this epic region of space where you could potentially put an object in and call a DRO. This particular DRO that the Chinese are using is very similar

to the one NASA Artemis I plans on being in briefly. So by their nature, DROs are chaotic orbits. So if you have ever read that book on chaos and you get into bifurcations and all like, you know, the logistics equation and how to get into all of this kind of stuff, here's your chance to study it in an orbital kind of scheme and understand some of the really cool astrodynamics that's going on and that is not based on certainty, it's based on kind of, okay, if we put a spacecraft in this area, it will generally be in this area.

So, you know, it becomes how do they detect if they're starting to go out of the bounds of stability. And if you look at some of the papers, they're quite fascinating about how they're kind of devising the use of this kind of space. And I can see the Chinese wanting to experiment here because gaining experience with that and finding out what works and what doesn't work would be very important for developing any kind of use of space around the moon

where these orbits become particularly enticing for either exploration or maybe even commercial reasons. I don't know how many times I'd like that. There's a certain category of orbits that are going to be the busy places. Yeah, yeah. So it's good to try it out and figure out what the bounds are. Yeah, like NASA had planned before it was canceled, the asteroid redirect mission to a DRO.

And it was simply because they could place it there with relatively low amounts of energy being needed to get an asteroid there and leave it there stably for a while so they could study it and do whatever they wanted to it. So it doesn't take much of an imagination to extrapolate that if you were dragging back big chunks of rocks full of valuable stuff that you could be utilizing an orbit like that to take those things apart and process the materials and, you know, do whatever you needed to do and still have access to the moon. I was to say, the amount of times I've gone to like, okay, what is this, this retrograde orb? I got to figure this out.

And then I go and then I go and read a paper on it. And then I kind of get it. And then like five minutes go by and I've completely like lost it. They're so weird and wacky, like the way that they operate. all the different side long top down it's like it's like yeah and it's like that's the thing about orbits you start

to get into this kind of like whole like reference frame idea like when you're looking at an orbit it's all about perspective and a lot of the images that I was posting on Twitter about about the service module in the DRO or from the perspective like a rotating frame of the moon and the earth

and but you can look at it in different frames and different kind of perspectives where you could see maybe the rotating frame of the Earth and the Sun to see how illumination would would occur on the spacecraft and see whether it's going to enter eclipses and whatnot. You could look at it from basically an Earth-centric kind of barricentric or geocentric point of view and see how it orbits the Earth. And if you look at a plot of that, then it looks like it's an orbit around the Earth on its own, but it never really leaves the influence of the moon. So you start to, you look at these different perspectives,

and this is kind of what I've been learning by poking my head into this, as you get into this, what astronomers go through. You know, that's 90% of astronomy. Yeah, I started to realize that astronomy isn't looking through a telescope and seeing something. Astronomy is really a lot of it is perspective, and seeing the universe and seeing different things from different perspectives and learning how to maneuver between those different perspectives to see something new.

And this is why I believe a lot of what I do is astronomy in the sense that, you know, astronomers spend a lot of time studying orbits. They obviously study other things, but, you know, that's one of the things. And satellites present that opportunity for an amateur to study orbital dynamics and learn some pretty cool stuff that can make the science of astronomy. me and astrophysics and a lot of these other things accessible to people because you can actually gain experience with it and learn about it and kind of get what they're talking about. And that's kind of one of the biggest things that I've found in this interest is it's kind to open my eyes to that.

I was never really, I didn't start out trying to like figure out orbits. You just kind of like all of a sudden you're in there and then you start to realize that you're figuring out orbits. And, you know, the next thing, you know, you're getting, I wouldn't say. I'm proficient at it, far from it. I still have a lot of work to do in some aspects of it that, you know, like the, you know, calculating delta Vs and all that kind of stuff. That's not my game yet.

Just got to get some more time in orbit. Just put some more time at KSP. Then you're good. Yeah, exactly. And that's maybe the next step for me. But, you know, right now it's reverse engineering observations and stuff like that. And that's what amateurs can do. And then you start to see, you start to understand all of those.

things that seem when you pick up a textbook on it that just makes your head spin, it just starts to, it just starts to make sense. You know, and it's an interesting thing. And I think if more people did it, then space would not be this kind of detached, kind of like understandable thing.

It would be like trying to navigate from one city to another. Really, it's that simple once you understand how the highway works. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, what's the, I'm kind of reminded, I think it's either Bill Nye or Neil Tyson that says this all the time.

But it's like if you know physics, you can predict the future, right? Because once there's no, there's no drag, there's a little bit of solar wind, I guess, is messing up your pure, frictionless physics environment. But like there's no, there's no drag. And so you get that, just like you said, you get like the one state vector. It's going in this direction, at this velocity, at this place and space. Then like you can have a great idea of like where it all happens, right? you, where we'll be...

Except for the weird, lumpy moon. The moon is weird. Then you get into this thing because we have all of these different things going on out there. It's not just, yeah, exactly. It's not, the moon is not a uniform thing. The Earth isn't. The sun isn't. And we've got these other lumpy things floating around on the solar system, too, that perturbed things.

So we end up with a chaotic system. So, you know, when we get into Psi Lunar space and stuff like that, we're really talking about the mathematics of chaos. And we're the butterfly effect. So that's what we're dealing with here. And you can imagine amateurs. They even contribute more butterflies to the effect than anything else because our instruments are so poor, inaccurate, and everything else.

So it takes quite a bit of effort and collaboration to really kind of make sense of all this stuff. And then learning what does work and what doesn't, given the means that we have access to. Have you been, I assume you've been following Capstone pretty closely because its mission is like expressly to basically do what you're doing every day and then make use of it as a navigation system, right? It's going to be measuring its orbit against LRO. It's going to be trying to have a positioning system around the moon. I'm curious, like, how you look at those kind of missions to,

like, the future of navigation, basically, is very similar to what you are doing with your time. And that feels kind of cool if you're like, oh, yeah, I'm just like, you know, I'm navigating my way around space. I just happen to be flying on Earth instead of a satellite. Yeah, I think Capstone is definitely an interesting mission. There's been quite a few lunar missions that have gone up that amateurs have tracked. There was a chap in Spain.

Daniel, he's an amateur radio operator that was collaborating very closely with the Chinese on those two little satellites, amateur radio satellites that were launched with Quaco. and one failed and the other one entered lunar orbit. And, you know, I was providing Doppler data and Daniel did quite a bit of some groundbreaking stuff with GMAT and really kind of taught me a lot. And, you know, he collaborated with the team to be able to produce some really stunning results in the eclipse photos that we had of the Earth with a lunar eclipse passing over from the moon. I was actually got pinged into that. It was like, Scott, we need some timing data when the spacecraft sets behind the moon so that we can refine our state vector. And those are the kind of things that happen all the time, you know, that you're kind of in the background of those pretty pictures that you see emerge from our community from time to time.

And, yeah, so there's all kinds of those things. I'm looking at the SLS launch coming up soon. There's going to be a confusing plethora. Yeah, it's just like, I think. It's mind-boggling all these targets. Like, you know, how do you prioritize? You know, and so some are going into the orbit, an orbit around the sun, some are going orbit around the moon, some, you know, some have different orbits.

So, like, yeah, there's just going to be so much stuff. I forgot about all that. The cube sets. Talking about the cube sets because they're just going to be like, boom. Yeah, it's just like mind-boggling. There's going to, you know, they're going to, all these targets are going to be visible. And a lot of them are being tracked by the deep space network. there's one of the operators of the Deep Space Network that's active on Twitter.

He was like, you know, I'm kind of like either this is going to be like a real, you know, awesome opportunity, a real nightmare. And he was looking at looking at it kind of like, you know, tongue and cheekly that it was going to be kind of a nightmare for them because they have so many objects. Yeah. Yeah. So hopefully. I'm sure they'll figure it out. I'm sure they have a really good plan already. So, but yeah, it's interesting. They're doing like the the bus stop thing, right? So like there's like a few points where they drop off. So like one in like Earth orbit and then like early in the, you know, the transit, middle transit, late transit, at the moon.

So there's like you should be able to like parse most of them. Says you who just wants to sit here and read Twitter. Like you're not doing all this. I like the fact that we have guests on this show that Artemis I expressly is going to piss off. Scott and Jonathan McDowell who wants to know where everything in space is going. Like that's our that's our shtick is like get the people who are going. to be really mad about how many things are coming off this, this spacecraft.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm sure it's going to be a challenge for Jonathan keeping track of that one, too. Like, I do send him updates constantly of any information that I have so he can keep his good work going. Jonathan is his work of documenting everything so meticulously. Someday those archives are going to become really valuable in understanding the history of space, human space activity, not just any particular country, but just humanity's approach to rocketry and stuff.

and space travel and just commercial use of space, military use of space, all uses of space. Yeah, he needs to start training some apprentices pretty soon here. Yeah, he's got to set up a foundation and have an actual library built or something. I think in a certain way, I think Jonathan's his good work in the public domain that he does. I think that's the best way in a decentralized kind of way to encourage people to understand that this is an area where, you know, you can collaborate and then contribute to. I think what we'll see as he gains more and more attention, hopefully someday he'll write a book about his work,

and he already publishes all the data that he gathers. So again, people will be able to carry that on because of that effort. So I don't think I don't see a threat or an issue with Jonathan having to train people, just releasing that information will encourage others to continue on that. work, should he ever be in a position of not being able to carry on? Hopefully. From your lips to the universe's ears. Scott, everyone should be following you on Twitter because you've been doing awesome tracking

of Russian satellites, given the whole situation in Ukraine right now. I've been enjoying watching that, even though I don't understand half of why we should care about Meridian 8, but that's the whole thing that people need to follow. Coastal 8049. Did they get that correct? 8049 That's where it Yeah

What else are you working on these days Is there anything else that you wouldn't let plug Or have people You know keep an eye on that you're working on? Right at the moment To be honest with you It's not like I conceive grand schemes And go looking for trouble

It's It's Trouble finds me You know like Every time you turn around You know you do some research A lot of times like For example, the Meridian satellites, I just used them initially as a way of testing my X-Bin

down converter. It was just a very convenient source. It was directly overhead all the time. And after a while, you're monitoring these signals and you start to get to know their patterns and routines. You start finding more and more about them. We actually decoded some of their TTI telemetry identifiers. The next step is we started mapping out where they're operating. and then something geopolitical happens where that information might be valuable to somebody. And also understanding just how prepared those communication assets are. And as we're seeing, there's some issues. So that's kind of how it starts.

And it's just not like there's any kind of divine kind of, you know, Zuma and image or a classic example. Okay, here's the plan. And then, okay, that plan went out the window pretty damn. quick, you know, and all you head on to something else, and it just metamorphosizes into something. But, yeah, that's kind of where my days and how I deal with my hobby goes. Well, it's been awesome to hear about it. So everyone needs to be following on Twitter. We'll put a link in the notes here so that people can follow you. But, Jack, you've plugged that you were talking on your show about China and Andrew Jones and

Nate Jopp and Scott. What else he got going on? Yeah, that's coming up next week. Last week, I published a cool, I don't know if I talked about this yet. I wasn't here last week. That's why, right? Yeah, you were bailed on me. Yeah, so last week I published an interview with Avi O'Con, who's an engineer at JPL, who's in charge of the drill on perseverance.

And it was like one of my favorite interviews ever because it was like the most honest. And, you know, like Scott, you mentioned how NASA is comfortable talking about their failures. And this is a perfect example of that because JPL just gave me the guy in charge. And we talked about everything that's gone wrong with this, with this drill and perseverance. and everything they've learned from it. So it was really cool. So if you really want to get into like the nuts and bolts of how you drill a hole on the planet Mars,

this is like the interview to listen to. It was like so much fun. So yeah. And then yeah, next week I won't be here again. So this is like a tough, tough time for me right now. You're on the road, but I have great friends coming next week. So I have these two books abandoned in place, which is, this was a pick back in the day on Off Nominal.

it is a excellent photography book of all of the launch sites at Cape Canaveral in that weird era between when the shuttle was flying and then when SpaceX kind of rejuvenated the place so everything's like a little bit decrepit abandoned in space and then the one that you got me as was this like

is a baby gift? Yeah interior space which is all of the high-res photos of inside the space station both by Roland Miller who has a new book coming out this spring he'll be coming on next one. week to talk about those books. Tim Dodd is going to be co-hosting because Jake's spailing on me. So I got my other friend who's into photography and space hardware to come. So that'll be

a lot of fun next week. I'm actually working next week, though. I'm not on vacation this time. So I'm going to be down at LPSC learning all about planetary science in Houston. I keep saying down. It's up now. It's up at LPC. I'm going to be up in Texas and it's going to be fun. Yeah, yeah. I'm on the expensive. one. So I'm excited for that. Yeah, and I have a new shirt out too today. So today is the 50th anniversary of Pioneer 10, which is the first spacecraft that crossed the asteroid belt, first one to study Jupiter up close. So continuing my series on planetary parks, you can check out the great red spot planetary park. I tried to get a view of like, you know, like you, those like planes that are

in the middle of hurricanes looking up at the eye of the hurricane. That's kind of. Yeah, that's the perspective I'm trying to get there. And then the Galilean moves the top there. Yeah, check it out if you want. That's what I'm up to. What about you, Anthony? You got an episode out today, right? New podcast today.

Yeah, Deborah Werner on Space News came on to talk about the situation. So we got into some stuff. I'm mostly just, you know, following along with that whole war situation. So check it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Scott, thanks again for coming on. It's been awesome chat with you. Thanks for having me, guys.

We will see you around. Bye everybody. Bye, everyone. 432, 3,2, 1, end of that.