Welcome back to another episode of Competition Update, Space Security Challenge style.
I'm your host, Jordan Wines.
Several teams are showing indications that they're making progress on the hardest challenge, number four,
but we don't have any confirmed solutions yet.
Be aware, though, that at some point in the next few hours, the scoreboard might be going off.
Depending on the organizers, anyway, many in-person CTFs have a tradition of blanking the scoreboard toward the end
for a little bit of increased drama, and I'm told we might see that happen here
so teams could slip in a surprise solution when that happens.
With no point decay, you probably have no incentive to hold back on an answer that you might otherwise do in a normal CTF.
If you've been watching this carousel webcams, you might have noticed the occasional astronaut heading into space
around our flatsats. Let's go ahead and take a look now.
Oh, we've got some audio. Let's see if we can mute that.
I'm not sure if it's coming through on that. Yeah, unfortunately, we've got a little bit too much audio on that video,
so we're going to have to probably kill that one.
The video that you're not seeing actually has some of the CubeSats in slow motion.
If you've been watching the webcams, we've actually got different views showing each of the satellites, the flatsats,
as they're spinning around, orienting themselves on top of the sun.
If we can stop this video before we zoom, it's going to be really good, or else you're going to hear some really interesting background noise.
One of our explorers was able to get that video. It showed 1550 trees flatsat as it actually orbited around the room.
We'll make sure to get that up on the YouTube playlist afterwards so you can catch it.
It was able to keep itself oriented on the sun as it went around the room, that, of course, being one of the previous challenges.
All right, for more information on the other things that have been going on behind the scenes,
we're going to see if we can bring Alex Taylor from Crimealance into the feed as well.
Alex, can you hear me, first of all?
Yeah, I can hear you great.
And I hear you, too. This is good. Awesome. All right, well, welcome to the stream. Thanks for coming on.
Yeah, thank you.
Okay, so first, can you tell me a little bit about what's been happening behind the scenes?
I talked to Bright, I talked to the Jasons, and they kind of gave me some updates on some of the design things.
But in terms of what's actually happening today and yesterday, anything interesting been going on?
Sure. So all of the flatsats in the room are connected to the ground stations that the teams are on via radios.
So one of the things that we have to do occasionally is move some of the radios around the room.
Sometimes there is some interference either from other radios or, you know, just from things that get moved around in the room.
Somebody starts to microwave a floor below or something, maybe?
There's some bits of metal and stuff that might be in the way, too.
So one of the things that you might see people come into frame doing is moving some of those radios around
just to make sure that teams are not getting large amounts of packet loss when they're communicating with the satellites.
Yeah, a little bit less deterministic than, I guess, a network challenge where the networks are a little bit more reliable.
When you're working with RF for every connection you make, you've got to deal with a little bit of that. That makes sense.
Yeah, and something we had to communicate to teams earlier as well is that this isn't a network service.
So they have to be very careful with the amount of data that they're sending.
They don't want to trip over themselves and cause their messages to not get completely sent.
I saw that message going on in the team chat, and I like that because you kind of, as an organizer,
you have to strike the balance between how much information you give.
And, you know, you don't want to give a hint on something that may help one team more than others.
But you want to also help everyone make productive progress.
And you want people to be doing things that might hurt themselves.
How else do you kind of have to deal with, like, fairness?
Have any other kind of concerns that have come up throughout the game so far?
Sure, yeah. So actually, early on day one, we realized that we had left a couple of files on certain teams' command and control systems
from some earlier testing that we had done to make sure the challenges were solvable.
Fortunately, the files that were left behind, we don't believe, gave away any information that would have been, you know,
would have given teams an unfair advantage in the competition.
But what we did is we decided to put all those files together into a single archive and give those out to all of the teams
so that if we were wrong and those files contained something that was useful,
at least every team had access to the same information before those challenges got released.
Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I think that's, you know, you always have to, as an organizer,
like, balance what decisions you make and trying to be fair is certainly important.
One thing I'm asking everyone, what is your favorite challenge?
And if it's not one we've seen yet, no spoilers, but if it's one we've already seen about,
you can, of course, talk in detail, or even just which one you worked on that you thought was most interesting.
Sure. Well, that's an interesting question. So you might expect me to say Challenge Zero, since that was the one that I worked on.
I know you did that one. Yeah, yeah.
Right. I would also say that Challenge Five, which is coming up, is pretty cool,
because it's the culmination of everything that the teams have been doing.
My personal favorite, though, is probably Challenge Three, just because it's the kind of challenge
I would be interested in solving if I were playing this event.
My background is very heavy on reverse engineering and exploitation.
And that's exactly what you have to do to solve those challenges.
Have a heavy amount of reverse engineering, you wind up with an exploit. It's good stuff.
Yeah, I agree. That's why I highlighted that one as well.
So, Alex, thank you very much for taking some time out from helping keep the game going.
I'll let you get back to that, and we'll continue wrapping up this update.
Thanks for having me.
Finally, here's our last Space Talk episode of the event from Just Coffee,
with a summary of how communications in space work,
something our teams have surely demonstrated competence with over these past few days.
Why do we use satellites like these for long-distance communication?
Communicating with a satellite ranges from several buildings' worth of highly specialized equipment
to a couple hundred dollars' worth of handheld amateur radio hardware.
LEOSATs, only about 400 to 2,000 kilometers up, are even close by terrestrial standards.
That means simple ham radios are often used to communicate with them.
There's even one aboard the International Space Station that you can use to talk to the astronauts
if you catch them at the right time and they're not too busy.
The complexity with communicating with LEO satellites is actually their orbital speed.
LEOSATs are moving so quickly that we have to use antennas that track them as they move rapidly across the sky.
This tracking can be really difficult due to the uncertainty of the satellite location
and how fast they move in and out of view.
A satellite coming in and out of view from horizon to horizon is called a pass.
Passes are the only times that we can actually communicate with satellites.
Management of LEO satellites especially revolves entirely around these concept of passes and maximizing their effectiveness.
For instance, it doesn't help having an imaging satellite over the target location
if you didn't have a pass before it got to that location to tell it to take that photo.
Similarly, you have to wait until the next pass to be able to actually bring that data back down to ground.
Passes are roughly about 5 to 10 minutes for LEO satellites.
This duration changes drastically based on where the ground station is located.
Near the equator, the Earth's rotation actually causes the ground station and the satellite to lose contact with each other faster.
But near the poles, Earth's rotation is negligible and the satellite is actually in view for almost twice as long, if not more.
Essentially, the higher the latitude of your ground station, the more useful your passes actually end up being.
This is the reason most ground stations are located in the higher latitudes, even in the very hard to reach locations.
One of the best examples of that is Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago that's extremely close to the North Pole.
It has over 100 commercial ground station antennas, making it the largest commercial ground station in the world.
As always, thanks Jess for the content and thanks to the team at the different studios for that awesome editing and animations that go into those Space Talk episodes.
That's our last hourly update of the competition. I look forward to seeing everyone at 4pm Pacific,
7pm Eastern, as we will have our final daily recap where we will reveal which team's solution is being run on our satellite.