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20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30.
20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30.
In 2020, the United States Air Force and Space Force sponsored a capture the flag style hacking competition designed to inspire the world's top cybersecurity talent to develop the skills necessary for the future.
To help reduce vulnerabilities and build more secure space systems.
The top eight teams from our qualification round work through a series of final event challenges.
The teams vied for the chance to send their code to instruct an on orbit satellite to take a picture of the moon.
In 2021, Hackasat 2 featured a 24 hour attack defense style CTF with physical hardware called a flat sat.
Each team also had access to a digital twin where they could try out their commands.
In a simulated space environment.
Once again, our final event has drawn the best hacking teams in the world to work through an attack and defend CTF.
This time, the entire game takes place within digital twin technology, which provides the most realistic space environment yet.
The simulation is designed to prepare teams for Hackasat 4 when the entire game will be hosted on an on orbit satellite called Moonlighter.
Moonlighter is designed specifically to help us all learn space faster through events like Hackasat.
Everything is set.
The top eight teams are ready to go.
The competition begins now.
Good morning.
Thank you for joining us today.
We are coming to you live from Hackasat headquarters in Los Angeles, California.
I'm Captain Kevin Burnett from Space Systems Command.
And I'm Rachel Mann from the Air Force Research Lab.
Welcome to Hackasat 3 final event.
This is a one of a kind capture the flag style competition kicked off just three hours ago.
We're joined by the world's most talented satellite hacking teams already in the thick of the competition.
This year, the competition will run over 23 hours of game time with an eight hour break in the middle.
During this game, teams will be protecting their satellites against attacks from the other teams.
At the same time, they'll be solving some really tough challenges designed to test their hacking skills and their knowledge of space systems.
So it's going to take a lot of creativity, perseverance, and of course caffeine to prevail in this talented field of teams.
So what's at stake?
Cold hard cash.
The top three ranked teams will receive $50,000 for first place, $30,000 for second place, and $20,000 for third place.
But most importantly, they are receiving the distinction of winning the Hackasat 3 competition.
That's right.
So Rachel and I, along with our fellow Hackasat organizers, will be co-hosting these live broadcasts to keep you updated on all things Hackasat throughout the progression of this weekend's events.
Stay tuned on Hackasat.com where you can watch past broadcasts, check the real time leaderboard, and satellite visualizations.
And learn more about space cybersecurity, hacking, and Hackasat.
In between broadcasts, you can listen to our original Hackasat playlist and join Dr. Hakim Oluseyi to play our Build-A-Sat mission, which lets you experience what it takes to build and test your very own space-worthy CubeSat.
Absolutely.
So there's so much going on, and this is all really exciting.
To make sure you don't miss anything, follow us on Twitter.
This game is complex and challenging, so we invite you to reach out.
Ask us anything about Hackasat.
The game.
The teams.
The technology.
The stakes of space cybersecurity.
You can post on Twitter any time throughout the broadcast with the hashtag shown on the screen, and we'll answer your questions.
We'll definitely respond on Twitter, but make sure to stay tuned, because really we can also address these questions here on the live broadcast.
Exactly.
And isn't this so exciting?
I'm so happy we've officially kicked off finals for year three.
You're right.
But honestly, Kev, we are the newbies on the team here.
So we can only watch from home for Hackasat 2, but being here in the middle of all of this and in the excitement, this is really great.
Yeah.
It's great to be here.
But don't worry.
You'll also hear later from our veterans, Steve and Eli, that you may remember from last year.
But for now, we want to learn along with you.
That's right.
So let's keep the ball rolling on all things Hackasat 3.
We're very grateful to have Colonel Decker from the Space Force, who is the director of engineering for Hackasat, to welcome our teams, our viewers, and to provide some insight as to why it's important to learn space faster.
Over to you, Colonel Decker.
Thanks, Rachel.
Thanks, Kevin.
Hey, it's really good to be here this morning with you.
The Department of the Air Force is really excited to lead the Hackasat 3 effort again this year.
So this program is something that we developed to bridge the gap between the DoD and the cybersecurity community.
We want to tap into the talent pool of the hacking community and extend the opportunity to explore how to take everyday cybersecurity principles and then apply them to space vehicle operations.
There are many benefits to this.
It reminds us of the importance and the urgency to bake in cyber resilience during the development phase of our space systems.
As the world now relies on satellites for everyday living, our daily activities are actually beginning to be more and more at risk.
This is because there are bad actors out there who are always looking for ways to exploit both ground and space-based systems for their personal or strategic gains.
It's a global challenge.
It's a global issue, and we've got to solve it.
By making the community aware of all the nuances in building space system resiliency, we work to defend space assets against these threats.
Another benefit is that we get to share our knowledge and tools with a community who in the past we thought we needed to keep out.
But actually, making the connection, we can encourage these talented individuals to work in this exciting, ever-important domain with us.
We do all of this in a controlled environment.
Over the years, we've taken a phased approach to the Hackasat competition.
We started out with a simple, off-the-shelf Flatsat, and we taught the competitors how to operate them.
Then we added two key assets, an improved Flatsat coupled with a purpose-built digital twin so that they can test commands and learn how the subsystems all interface with one another.
This year, we're giving them an incredibly high-fidelity digital twin that is representative of the satellite that we're going to launch next year for Hackasat 4.
We find that this approach is the best way to get folks involved and familiar with the space operations.
We're really excited to see how the teams perform this year, and we want to wish you all good luck.
We know this is difficult.
There are new challenges out there, but we know that you're going to get through this.
But it's time for us to all learn space faster.
So, Kevin, Rachel, back over to you.
Thanks so much.
I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head there, so we appreciate that.
Thanks again, Colonel Decker.
We were very fortunate to have such innovative and supportive leaders in the department.
Absolutely.
And speaking of great support, for three years now, we've been teaming up with the Aerospace Village at DEF CON to help bring the space and cyber communities together and ultimately make Hackasat what it is today.
Since we rely on space in our everyday lives, from rideshare apps,
mobile banking, credit card transactions, or weather data, it's important to have these communities working together and even better to be in an environment where security research and education is as hands-on as it is at a place like DEF CON.
Exactly.
I mean, can you imagine trying to call an Uber to get to the park or a restaurant and your phone's just not working anymore?
No.
No, thank you.
So joining our show today, we have Matt Mays, Deputy Director of Aerospace Village.
Matt, thanks again for letting us be a part of the Aerospace Village this year and, of course, being with us here today.
Thanks, Rachel.
As a pilot myself, I can absolutely attest to the importance of aviation and space cybersecurity.
I literally rely on it as part of my livelihood.
Can I just say that I am so honored to be here, continuing this partnership we've developed over the past three years.
This is such an amazing event that is turning heads, specifically the best hackers in the world are now playing in the space cybersecurity domain.
While I'm very impressed by the abilities that are on display, I really love the educational piece of this.
What a fantastic way for people who aren't knowledgeable in this domain to be able to learn new skills.
Hackasat is more than just a competition.
It's a great source for learning and experimenting for the majority of people that don't have easy access to a satellite.
And that really is a key component of how this event ties into the Aerospace Village.
Our mission is to build, inspire, and promote.
Hackasat helps us do all of those things.
That's awesome.
So let's expand on that a bit, Matt.
I know back in 2019, the Air Force and the Defense Digital Service worked with the newly formed Aviation Village at DEF CON to begin growing this community.
But how did you go from the Aviation Village to Aerospace Village?
Yes, back in 2019, we were focused on aviation.
But looking back, it makes so much sense to have expanded to encompass all of aerospace because of just how intertwined aviation and space security really are.
And as you know, we want to take our message to as wide an audience as possible, an approach we typically refer to as crawl, walk, run.
And Hackasat has done just that, providing engagement opportunities for not only seasoned hackers but also the newbies to space cybersecurity.
Absolutely. That's right, Matt.
So this year, we gave educational talks.
We had a hands-on workshop with our digital twin.
And we showed off our flat-set hardware from past competitions.
It was great to have Hackasat be a part of the Aerospace Village this year.
The theme for DEF CON 30 was hacker homecoming.
And it was a very appropriate theme as 25,000 hackers once again gathered in Las Vegas for a fully in-person event after two years of being virtual.
DEF CON was an incredibly successful event with the Aerospace Village being one of the most popular villages.
We continue to see tremendous growth in the Aerospace Village, especially with partners involved in the space industry.
And really, Hackasat continues to be a highlight based on its growing presence and outreach efforts.
Well, we had a blast being there.
We really did.
Honestly, I know there's a lot of competition to see this weekend.
There's much more to talk about.
But while we have you here, Matt, we've got to talk next year.
Hackasat 4 is going to be epic.
And we are really excited to bring that to the Aerospace Village.
I'm glad you mentioned it because we are pumped to help make that happen.
Tell us exactly what you're dreaming up for your big finale.
Well, nothing other than the world's first ever CTM.
That's right.
The first ever CTF in space.
Unlike other years, we'll actually be in the same room as our finalists at DEF CON in the Aerospace Village.
All of our Hackasat events to date have been virtual, but now it's time for our teams to go face to face.
Wait a minute.
You're telling me space CTF, but the teams are here with you?
Honestly, you heard that right, Matt.
So Moonlighter will be orbiting in space, and the teams will be in Las Vegas, sitting in the Aerospace Village, communicating with that very satellite.
So speaking of space, we're going to need a bigger space for the Aerospace Village.
We sure will.
Yep.
Moonlighter will be an amazing tool for the community, and we're psyched to highlight this work in the Aerospace Village.
It really contributes to our mission, and we look forward to encouraging the next generation of space security experts.
Well, I think that sums it up perfectly, Matt.
The success of Hackasat depends on the interest and support of the DEF CON community, as well as our partnership that we've built with the Aerospace Village.
With their help, we've made a lot of progress on our mission to ensure that we all learn space faster.
We can't wait to be there next year, and thanks again for being such a great sport for Hackasat.
Thanks for having me.
All right, see you in Vegas.
Okay, Rachel, what's up next?
All right, so our co-host and my colleague from the Air Force Research Lab, Steve Colenso, is here to catch us up on what we've accomplished from Hackasat 1 all the way through this year's qualification round.
Over to you, Steve.
Hey, everyone.
I'm Steve Colenso with the Air Force Research Lab, and I, along with other members of the Air Force, the U.S. Space Force, and many other partners,
make up the Hackasat team.
Over the past two years, Hackasat has garnered over 10,000 international competitors and millions of spectators from industry, academia, government, and the press.
The Hackasat CTF has been held on everything from specialized space hardware on air bearing tables to CubeSat form factor systems,
creating space-relevant environments that gave access to a unique and novel experience for the competitors.
Hackasat has changed the way the globe looks at cybersecurity in space,
and how satellite designers and developers go about building security into their systems.
Eli, what's the future hold for Hackasat?
Okay, this October, we have our final event for Hackasat 3, where the top eight teams from this year's qualifications will take their shot at winning over $100,000 in cash prizes.
Looking into next year, our biggest yet, we are going to be launching our space vehicle called Moonlighter.
It's going to be on orbit, the first CTF in space.
Moonlighter is set to launch in March 2020.
And we will host the Hackasat 4 final event on this platform as the first on-orbit competition.
Thanks, Steve.
So for the Hackasat 3 qualification event, which was a Jeopardy-style event held on May 21st and 22nd that was approximately 32 hours long,
there were 27 challenges over seven categories ranging from space math to cryptology.
We had over 800 teams and about 2,500 individuals participating.
The top 10 winning teams received $10,000 in cash prizes.
And the top 40 teams received prize packs that had T-shirts, stickers, and coins.
As you can see here, there were a number of challenges that were very difficult just by looking at the number of solves.
The larger piece of the pie shows the easier challenges.
And as we moved throughout the competition, we had some very difficult ones that only got a few solves.
Mike Walker from our development team is going to walk through Don't Fly Me Into the Moon.
All yours, Mike.
Hey, this is Mike Walker.
I'm a principal software engineer at Promulence.
And my handle during Hackasat is Cydonia.
Today I'll be going over the Don't Fly Me Into the Moon challenge that we ran during this year's Hackasat 3 qualification round.
This challenge was inspired by real-life events.
In January of this year, Bill Gray and several other astronomers who were tracking objects in Earth's orbit realized that there was an unknown object that would hit the moon in early March.
There was initially some confusion over what exactly this object was.
Initially, the astronomers thought this object was the upper stage of a SpaceX booster that was from several years ago inserting a satellite into geosynchronous orbit.
Later they updated their findings to suggest that maybe this was a Chinese launch rocket booster.
Regardless of the origin, it's really standard procedure and extremely common for people and launch vehicles to be abandoned for an upper stage of a rocket booster.
orbit uh there's not a lot of fuel to bring them back and it's something that's pretty regularly
done um so it's not it's not it's not unusual or or even strange that uh that somebody might have
lost track of this booster in march of this year as predicted this object smashed into the backside
of the moon the impact crater was even confirmed several months later by nasa's lunar reconnaissance
orbiter and when this story hit the news we thought this would make a great uh advanced
level uh space map challenge here's how we presented the problem the challenge prompt
introduces the problem and there's a really big hint in the prompt it tells you you're working
for the galactic mining mining and tunneling corporation and specifically says that its
acronym is gmat it's good to be inquisitive during these ctf events so you know if you were to just
google gmat and space uh you'd find that this reference is a free tool that does orbit planning
provided by nasa and that this tool is easy to
install and comes with several tutorials on mission planning it's highly advised that you use a tool
like this when solving this problem otherwise you have a lot of issues when you log into the
challenge itself you can see it gives you the orbital parameters that bill gray and his team
released in january and then simply asks you for a timed list of maneuvers with a limit an upper
limit of two kilometers a second of delta v which is quite a bit before we jump into the solution
let's talk just about the
the statistics overview for this challenge uh only four solves occurred on this it was it was a very
hard problem i would rate this even at the graduate level uh you know engineering graduate
students would try to solve this for a homework problem um and you can see the the fastest team
solved it in four hours and we even had teams that took over over 12 hours to solve it so
congratulations to all the teams that solved this you really solved an advanced uh very
hard orbital mechanics problem you know one that one that would easily be given
as a homework assignment at the graduate level all right so let's talk about the solution to this
problem there's a few complexities that we need to acknowledge and and account for in order to
properly solve this problem the first is that we're dealing in what's called the n-body problem
there's multiple gravitational bodies in the solar system hundreds of them actually but the primary
ones we're concerned about in this problem are the earth the moon and the sun in past hackasats
we're concerned about in this problem are the earth the moon and the sun in past hackasats
we're concerned about in this problem are the earth the moon and the sun in past hackasats
but in this one you needed to account for the sun the earth and the moon at a minimum to solve
the problem and you could actually verify this if you set up the problem in gmat or whatever tool
you were using the object in question the booster won't hit the moon unless you turn on gravity for
all of these for all of these bodies and if you're not replicating what we said would happen
you know the booster doesn't hit the moon you're not going to have a chance to really
solve this problem without first replicating uh you know the the problem itself a couple things
to note there's no closed form solutions to the n-body problem so like we said capillary and
orbital mechanics won't work here also the moon's orbit is elliptical so even generalizations
like the circularly restricted three-body problem won't suffice but it turns out space agencies
and companies solve this type of problem all the time you can solve this problem using a method
called two-point boundary value problem solver we know what the dynamics are the solution is in
closed form but it's a numerical method to solve you know the trajectory because we know two
points so we're going to be using a two-point boundary value problem solver and gmat actually
comes with several tutorials that teach you how to use this tool so let's take a look at the initial
orbit uh you can see in green we have the booster uh the moon is gray and the l4 point which is
where we're trying to bring the booster to is in
purple um what we're going to see as we go through this trajectory is that the
the booster will complete two orbits it'll go through epilepsy twice um and after right after
the second apple abscess is going to snap smash into the back of the moon so we can see here it's
gone through the first epilepsy which is the highest point in the orbit it's going to swing
back by the earth and you'll see that the orbit has changed it's no longer capillary and because
it came too close to the moon the moon's gravity changed the orbit so the orbit's changed you're
in a different orbit now we're going to hit the second apollapsus the second time it hits its
highest point in the orbit and then in just a few seconds here we're going to smash into the moon
just as belt gray predicted it there's the lunar impact
so here we have a basic cartoon of the earth and the moon and we're going to talk about our
problem in three simple steps and we have here you see the concept that it's Что так 얘기ENE
呈
this cartoon to sort of plan out what we want to do before we go implement it in gmax step one is
we're going to drift to the second aplapsus which is the highest point in our orbit step two is once
we get there we're going to use the two point boundary value problem solver to to solve a burn
that will take us to earth moon l4 once we get to l4 we're going to solve a burn that makes our
velocity zero with respect to l4 uh lagrange points are like l4 are equilibrium points in
the earth moon circular restricted three body problem and if you're exactly on that point
you'll stay there l4 and l5 specifically are marginally stable points which means if you get
close to them you'll stay close to them at least in the circular restricted free body problem now
we said we aren't in that problem you know we have more than just the earth and the moon
but we'll see that this approximation will hold up at least for a basic solve to this this problem
all right so let's talk about using gmat
step for step one we're going to set up the initial conditions in tmat we're going to turn
on gravity for all bodies you only need to do it for the earth moon and sun to solve this um
but we just turned it on in our solver for everything like even paluto which has almost
no effect you know we just turned everything on um we're then going to propagate to the second
aplapsus you can see the first two steps of the mission sequence are to go to aplapsus one and two
then we set up a targeting maneuver which is the two-point boundary value problem solver
and we allow that to vary our time of flight and our
delta v along each axis so that's four four coefficients that can vary time of flight delta
v and the x-axis delta v and the y-axis delta v and the z-axis uh and then we tell it to achieve
or to target x equals y equals zero in the new l4 frame so you know we know we want to go to
l4 we want our position to be zero with respect to that so we're going to try and hit that
then step three is an easier solve uh once we get to that l4 point we're going to use the same
two-point boundary value problem solver uh to vary delta v and all we're trying to achieve here
is that our velocity with respect to l4 is zero um so it takes much longer to learn how to use
this and solve all this i just blew through the answer but it really is you know once you know
what to do it's that straightforward so let's take a look at our our solve in gmat you can see
our this is the same sort of video we saw before our booster is going through the first
of the second one and then you'll see the trajectory will turn orange as we as we as
we do our burn and go to l4 and then you'll see when we get to l4 um that we do another
burn and we stay there so let's just wait for that to happen all right so you can see we're
getting close to l4 we just hit it and now you can see that our booster is actually tracking with the
l4 but as we go around the full lunar orbit you'll see it slowly starting to drift away right now
you might be asking i thought you said l4 is stable right like if i if i go there won't i stay there
and the answer is if there was only the earth and the moon and that moon's orbit was a circle
yes you would uh but the moon's orbit isn't a circle it's an ellipse um and there are other
bodies bodies specifically the sun that are perturbing that orbit so you can see we stay
close to l4 but we don't stay exactly
there um so that's it for the solution uh that was sufficient to you know stay close enough to
l4 to solve this problem and get the flag uh so yeah congratulations to the teams that solved
this challenge uh you know single event upset pslv delta lays and nsl uh you all did a great
job and uh you know you did great at space math congratulations all right thank you
thank you
that was fascinating if you want to hear how teams solved another quals challenge check out the
welcome to the spider verse explainer on our learn page at hackasat.com we're excited to
welcome back our ctf expert and hackasat sideline reporter jordan wines jordan's here to help us
better understand the competition and team strategies
tell us all about their moments of triumph and their epic fails welcome jordan thanks kevin
as always i'm super glad to be back here i'm really looking forward to the finals
in hackensack 3 i think the challenges that we've got for the teams this year are extra good
the progression we've had from hackensack 1 to now is fantastic the competition team has really
done a great job so if you remember if you were here with us back you know two years ago hackensack
one was just a race through parallel infrastructure so teams did better or worse based on how far they
were from the challenges and how quickly they did it there was no interaction and it was fairly
simplified and this was intentional so that teams could sort of learn some of the basics without
having to worry about their competitors year two started to introduce a little bit of the kind of
attack defense concepts which we'll talk more about later and now year three it's much more
realistic teams are really going to have to think about how they can impact other team satellites
how they can minimize attacks against theirs and the whole world that's being simulated for the
most part of them is just much more detailed than before but before we get too much into the
details of the current event let me just take a step back for those of you who might be new to
the broadcast or might not even be familiar with what we're talking about as rachel said
hackensack 3 is a capture the flag competition or ctf hacking ctfs as they're called sometimes
are common in the cyber security world for both professionals hobbyists and students alike the
most popular website for tracking these events ctf time actually recorded 240 events
2021 alone so these are events that are run usually at a particular time period just for
a weekend or maybe a week and they all have cyber security challenges involved in them but there are
a variety of different styles sometimes you're just trying to solve an offensive challenge you
get a server and you've got to attack it and get into it sometimes you've got to solve an offline
forensics challenge in your box sometimes you have to defend a server that other people are attacking
and in a very few of them called attack defense ad or full spectrum events you're actually doing
both of those things at the same time so we're going to talk a little bit more about that in a
little bit more detail but before we do that let me just give you a little bit of an overview of
hackensack 3 is one such event and while most of our teams have played many many capture the
flag events they can't get too comfortable because there's a big difference between an earthbound
capture the flag and one like ours in space to start with the most obvious difference is you
don't have a server that you're defending a normal network but you have a satellite you
don't just have a network connection directly to your satellite at all times
you've got a server that you're defending and you're not using it and your network connection
a lot of different reasons to do that and how to do that first of all the information online
and the the cubesats were all in the room here with us where we were running the events
and the teams accessed them remotely this year however in preparation for next year's on orbit in
hackassat4 they're doing a virtual event called the virtual virtual satellite system called a
a digital twin.
To learn more about the differences in the game,
these competitions, scoring as well as the digital twin,
let's bring on two of our actual competition experts,
Mark W. and Bryce K.
First, let's start with Bryce,
if you want to come on and join me.
Howdy, how's it going?
Welcome, Bryce.
How's it going?
Are you happy with the game so far?
I am very happy with how the game's been going so far.
There's been a few technical glitches so far this morning,
but one of them's been worked out
and one of them is being worked out.
I honestly, just looking at the scoring
and stuff, I'm pretty happy too.
So we'll get into more of the game updates later,
but it's looking really good.
So let's start off with,
what are some of the differences maybe between scoring
from past years to this year's?
Is it similar or are there changes
to how teams are gonna score and get points?
It's broadly similar to last year.
Points are basically additive,
teams get points by keeping their SLA up,
so making sure their battery's charged,
making sure they're not spinning wildly out of control,
down linking bytes, that kind of thing.
In addition, there's a lot of these
other components or turn-styles that teams go through.
One of the first turn-styles was just being able
to shell into the game infrastructure at all,
and teams got a whole bucket of points for that.
As the game goes on, there'll be other points available
for taking flags from other places
in the game infrastructure, scoring them for points,
and a few other surprises.
Yeah, so I think it's important
to emphasize to the audience.
So there are, the service level challenges
are just basically keeping your system functional.
Like early on in CTFs, we all realized
that you can just turn your server off
and no one can hack you.
It's not very interesting.
And so any of these attack defense CTFs
require teams to maintain their systems
to keep them up and operational,
and so we're doing that through these SLA
that are throughout the whole game, they have to do that.
But then there's a lot of these other things.
I think it's interesting, too, how there's not only
challenges that get you some points just for getting it,
but then you can use that to have an impact
on maybe your SLA or some of these other things.
Right, that's one aspect that, to me,
has been really interesting,
especially this year in particular.
Some of these challenges, you get points for it once
for actually solving them in the first place,
but once you've been able to solve them,
you're able to solve them again as a utility
to help you get to other places in the game.
Yeah, I think that's gonna be fascinating.
I'm really looking forward to seeing what the teams do.
Thanks for coming out.
I don't wanna monopolize too much of your time.
We'll let you get back to those systems.
All right, thanks.
Good work so far, thanks.
And next up, we're gonna go ahead and bring on Mark.
Mark is one of the experts in the digital twin system
that we've been talking about a little bit.
In the past, welcome, Mark, first.
Hey, Jordan.
Are you excited as well?
Oh, absolutely.
Okay, I don't wanna overhype it,
but there's always a little bit of nerves,
and then when you see teams first score in a challenge,
it's just like, okay, it's working, right?
You get that cyber relief.
So let's talk a little bit about the digital twin,
because we've described it as a sort of simulacrum
of the satellite, or it's a digital copy,
but this year, it's more than that, right?
So tell me about what's kind of involved
in the digital twin this year.
Right, so like last year,
we had the flat sat sitting on a benchtop,
but we couldn't do a lot of simulation on the orbits,
and especially for the RF links
with them sitting on the benchtop.
We couldn't say this satellite is going out of view,
going over the horizon.
You're losing contact with some ground station.
This year, by going full digital,
we've got basically, we're simulating the Earth,
we're simulating the eight satellites in their LEO orbits.
We have a whole slew,
a bunch of different ground stations spread around the world,
and basically, we propagate those orbits.
We've got game time running at real time,
and basically, they're going in and out of contact
with many of these different ground stations.
They might only have, say, 20 minutes
on a given ground station to actually utilize it,
and then at some point, they're gonna have to
close up that contact and look for the next ground station.
Yeah, this makes a lot of sense that we're,
next year, that's obviously gonna happen
because it's gonna be a satellite in space.
We don't get to talk to it all the time.
You have to actually have different ground stations
to maintain communication.
So modeling that, I think, makes a ton of sense.
Are there any other changes for the teams when they're,
like, the digital twin?
The teams, like, they had how long to get used to this, right?
So, like, last year, it was just you always had access,
so this was a difference for them.
Did we give them practice so that they could
kind of get up to speed on this?
We did.
So about a week ago, we released a digital twin for them,
and in there, we provided a ground station
so they could practice some of the pointing,
and we gave them a geo-satellite
so they'd always have access to it,
so that'd be easy to just kind of practice along with.
But yeah, so, and that was running the flight software
and had all the sort of ground station
sort of commands that they'd need to get familiar with.
So yeah, they've had about a week
with those aspects of the system.
So for the non-satellite nerds,
which I'm not, I've learned some of it,
but geo and leo, let's talk about that.
All right, so geo-stationary,
so that's just basically staying over
the same spot of the Earth.
So when you point that antenna, you don't need to move it.
So point it once, you're fine.
Now, for the low Earth orbit, that's what I'm saying.
So during the game, where you might only have
20 minutes of this pass,
so the spacecraft, it's going over very quickly.
You've gotta keep moving that antenna.
And as part of the game, they have to steer the antenna.
It's not just point at my satellite and it figures it out.
So they have to do all that math to figure out,
all right, here's the azimuth and elevation commands
and what time I need to send them
to keep that antenna tracking during that whole pass.
The cop with the radar gun tracking them on the highway,
trying to keep them in range
so they can still talk to them.
That makes sense, all right.
Well, thank you very much for coming out.
Really appreciate it.
I don't want to monopolize again your time,
let you get back to the game.
But good luck and good work so far.
Awesome, thanks, Jordan.
Excellent.
So really appreciate hearing
from those two.
Again, these are the people that actually make the game,
despite us sitting here on the camera
talking about all the hard work that they're doing.
Mark has actually already recorded
a much more in-depth explanation about the digital twin.
And it's so important to this game.
Let's go ahead and learn
a little bit more information about that.
Unlike HACASAT 1 and 2,
which used physical hardware called flatsats,
HACASAT 3 will be entirely virtual
using a digital twin,
which closely simulates real space hardware and software.
The team's aim is to focus on learning at speed
to build their abilities and confidence in HACASAT 3
to prepare for HACASAT 4.
Let's take a closer look at the HACASAT flatsat.
Actual satellites are usually composed
of several subsystems that are tightly stacked
and interconnected to save space.
This configuration is not helpful during development
because it is difficult or impossible
to attach test equipment, and, you know,
debugging interfaces to every component.
A flatsat is an engineering model of the satellite
where the boards are laid flat on a workbench
and connected with cables and extenders.
All its test points and interfaces are readily accessible
to the engineers during development,
integration, and testing.
By this definition, the HACASAT flatsat
isn't strictly a flatsat, but it serves a similar purpose.
Its intent is to be an engineering model
of a realistic satellite with sensors and actuators
with exposed test and debugging.
To achieve this, HACASAT 3 will be using
a digital twin in HACASAT 3.
Let's learn more.
Mark Wehrmeier, Hello, everyone.
This is Mark Wehrmeier, also handles Spacey McSpaceSpace
from Qualls earlier this year.
I'm one of the engineers at Cromulence working
on the digital twin.
So just a quick overview of the architecture
of the different pieces and tools
that we brought together in the system.
So one of the important things we brought
in this year is a spacecraft simulation framework called BASC.
This is from CU Boulder's APS laboratory, and this allows us to do a lot of, manage a lot of the physics simulations, so manage the spacecraft orbits.
We can put in things like star trackers and create telemetry from those devices, and we can send that telemetry onto flight software.
So like we're using NASA's CFS and OpenSat kits to actually process that telemetry and make the spacecraft think it's in an actual orbit.
So kind of, it's broken into two halves. So on the left hand side is more the infrastructure simulation side.
This is more like what the admins would be looking at. So it has the basilisk piece in there that's handling all the simulation elements.
And then that sim data, while part of it's being passed to the spacecraft flight software,
also parts of it are being passed to Grafana and CesiumJS, where we have some introspection into what the simulation is doing.
And then CesiumJS allows us to get a 3D visualization, actually see the spacecraft in its orbit over the Earth,
see where the attitude is pointing, see if the solar panels are pointed at the sun, get all that kind of information in a nice 3D visualization.
On the right hand side, so we've got our sensor data that's being passed into CoreFlight's software.
And then we've got our GPS system. So we're, this year we are running this on a RISC-V processor that we're emulating in QMU.
And that sensor data, so like our GPS receiver, telemetry, positions, velocities, our star tracker attitude quaternions,
how much power subsystems are consuming, how much power the solar panels are generating and what's stored in the batteries,
all that information is passed from basilisk over to CFS and OpenCVS.
And then we've got our SAC kit and our RISC-V processor.
So those pieces, that constitutes what we're calling the spacecraft in the game.
And then from there, the spacecraft can be commanded and controlled from, so like a ground system sort of software,
like a satellite operator would use. This year we've migrated to Ball Aerospace's Cosmos 5.
So this allows us to send commands up to that spacecraft so we can point the, point it where we want.
We can turn on and off subsystems. We can also view the telemetry coming back down.
And so one difference between, so like when we're looking at sim data, we might be able to see all the attitude data
and other physics data being generated. But then on the Cosmos side, we would only be able to see telemetry
and send up commands when we have a connection established with the spacecraft.
So, or if we turned off, for example, the star tracker, we'd no longer be able to see that star tracker telemetry in Cosmos,
even though it's still being generated.
So that's something that we've handled over on the Basilisk side.
A quick shout out to all the tools that we brought in.
So like I said, Basilisk from CU Boulder's AVS laboratory, also CesiumJS, Core Flight System from NASA,
Ball Aerospace's Cosmos, Grafana, Linux on Litex, and OpenStackKit.
So when I start up the Digital Twin, you're going to see these four screens.
So just a quick explanation of what's happening. In the top left is our flight software.
So this is where we have RISC-V, EmuSat, and the VSCS.
These are all simulated in QMU.
And on top of that, we're running our NASA core flight software apps and OpenStackKit,
as well as our custom flight software that we've added in.
And then on the right hand side, the Cesium visualization.
So this is where we can see where the spacecraft is in its orbit.
We can actually move this visualization backwards and forwards in time.
We can see if we're over ground station.
We can see what the spacecraft attitude is if we're pointed at the sun.
And the bottom left is the Grafana introspection into the simulation data that's being generated by Basilisk.
So we'll be able to see the battery charge levels, what the solar panels are doing,
what the devices are doing, how much power they're consuming.
If we have any tumble rates on the spacecraft, we can see all of that stuff there.
And then in the bottom right is the Cosmos 5.
This is sort of the satellite operator view.
So this is where we can send up commands like a team would in finals.
And also view to 1-3.
So now starting up the demo.
So we've got all our four windows here.
The first thing I'm going to do is start the flight software.
So this is basically this is starting up for flight system.
We've already got the RISC-V processor running.
You can see all of the CFS apps starting in that top left window.
So basically, we've got our spacecraft started up.
Now we should be able to send commands to it and receive telemetry from it.
We've added in a gremlin for demonstration purposes here.
That's actually sending all of those actuator commands that you see in the flight software.
So this is basically sending a bunch of rogue reaction wheel commands to cause the spacecraft to do a little tumble for us.
So over on the cesium visualization, here's our spacecraft.
It's doing that commanded tumble.
We're over our tribute Vegas ground station for DEFCON.
And I'm just kind of showing here.
You can just rotate around in the cesium view.
You can get a really good idea of what's happening.
So, for example, it's really hard to understand what your spacecraft is doing by just looking at, for example, quaternion values or Cartesian XYZ positions and velocity values.
It's kind of hard to make sense of that.
So putting it here in the visualization is a really good idea.
It's a really good way to actually understand and sanity check what's happening.
So down the bottom left, we're looking at some of the simulation data that Grafana is graphing for us.
So we can see because we have this tumble, we have a slowly declining battery charge rate.
And as well, we have this oscillating sort of behavior happening with the charge rate and also on the solar panels themselves.
So as the spacecraft is tumbling, sometimes it's the solar panels are pointed at the sun and sometimes they're not.
So that's why that's going up and down and why our battery charges are declining.
Also, here we have this is a stack up of all of the subsystems and what they're consuming in terms of power.
So we've also added another gremlin in here, which is randomly turning on and off different subsystems to demonstrate on the graph.
You can see that it's kind of shifting what subsystems are consuming power or how much power they're consuming.
Moving further down.
So here's our.
This is our actual simulation position and velocity data and our attitude data.
So we're tracking angular velocity, what the spacecraft's quaternion is.
And up here we can see other things like our three reaction wheels.
What speeds are they operating at?
So like I said, the gremlin is sending these rogue reaction wheel commands, which is causing the reaction wheel to spin up.
And then a couple other sensors here.
You can see magnetometers, sun sensors.
So moving over to the Cosmos side, we can see that we have a connection.
Our Cosmos interface is connected with the spacecraft.
We haven't sent or received any commands yet.
So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to turn on telemetry from the spacecraft.
So I'm commanding the spacecraft to start down linking telemetry packets for me to view.
Sending that command and we should see it pop up in the top left.
So there it says telemetry output has been enabled.
So our our core flight software has recognized that our command is now sending us telemetry.
So here we see our received bytes count is increasing.
So we're receiving those telemetry packets.
And we can look here at a couple of different ones that we're receiving.
So we're receiving course on sensor, GPS, IMU packets.
We open up the GPS packet. We can see in here that these values are updating as packets are coming in.
So we have our CCSDS header to start with.
And then lower down, we have the actual GPS payloads on the tree.
So our X, our Cartesian X values and velocity values.
Another way to look at the telemetry, we built just a couple basic telemetry viewer screens.
So this one shows what devices we're commanding to be on and off.
So like I said, the Gremlin that we're running is randomly turning on and off different ones.
So like right now, the GPS just turned off.
And then you should see that turn back on in a minute and something else will turn on.
And then on the right, we have the GPS and Star Tracker telemetry.
So those packets are actually being downlinked and Cosmos is parsing them.
You can see that little gap in GPS telemetry.
So the GPS receiver was off and then it turned back on and continued collecting telemetry.
And now the Star Tracker just went off.
So the Star Tracker telemetry is no longer updating.
And then it should turn on back in a second here.
There it goes.
So now we're receiving those Star Tracker telemetry packets again.
And just monitoring, you know, the Gremlin sending those, the road reaction wheel commands.
So that's causing those Star Tracker telemetry quaternions to do those variations and rotations.
So right now what I'm doing to demonstrate what the flight software is doing.
So I'm actually going to kill the core CPU on process.
So I've actually stopped the flight software.
And now looking back in Cosmos, we can see we're no longer receiving any Star Tracker telemetry.
Those graphs have just stopped at their last recorded values.
So this would be like a satellite operator when you've gone out of, for example, you've gone out of contact with your spacecraft.
You would no longer see these.
You would just see whatever the last recorded values are for that telemetry.
And further illustrating this, so our received bytes is no longer incrementing.
So even though we've turned off the flight software, Basilisk is still simulating the spacecraft.
It's still handling all the physics.
So our spacecraft is still tumbling.
Our orbit is still propagating.
We can see that happening in Cesium.
And we can see it in the Grafana Windows as well.
So these Grafana simulation values are still updating and still generating values for us, even though the flight software is not running and we're not collecting telemetry as a spacecraft operator.
And then so power consumption, we've turned off the flight software, which also killed our gremlin that was turning on and off random subsystems.
So the subsystems are just remaining in their previous state.
They're no longer changing, turning on and off.
All right.
And that's it for the digital twins.
Thank you.
Thanks for the demo.
All right.
Thanks.
So there you have a much more detail about the infrastructure that the game is running in this year.
But the real stars of the event are, of course, the teams themselves who battled it out in a qualifying round to make it here to the finals.
They beat out over 800 teams just to be here.
They're literally the top 1%.
And you can tell these teams are starting to figure out some of these unique problems with space by looking at the number of returning veterans.
This year, we're rejoined by five veteran teams from last year's finals.
I'm Simon.
I'm Alex.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
These five veterans are joined, of course, by three rookies who've never made it out yet to a final event here at Hackasad.
Let's see if they have what it takes to hack in space.
Thank you.
We also have a diverse field in play here.
Half our teams have members mostly from the United States,
and the other half are from all over the world.
So, it's really a good mix that we've got here.
Back to the desk.
Now, Jordan, Kevin and I, we were, honestly, we relate most with the rookies of Hackasad.
So, I'd love to hear about what the competition is like for the teams who are brand new to Hackasad.
Are we saying that rookies are underdogs?
I don't know if I would call them exactly underdogs, but it's definitely harder.
They're coming in with maybe a little less experience in some of the specifics here.
So, during the qualifying rounds, for example, all the teams are demonstrating prowess and knowledge,
wisdom, and courage.
So, it's really a good mix for the teams who are coming in with space math and with some of the, like, the calculations and some of these problems that are unique to space.
But they've never maybe run an operational ground station for a period of time or had to maintain it in a kind of live battle.
And this is true with even CTFs like a DEF CON CTF.
The qualifying round, you solve a bunch of problems.
You show that you're a good hacker.
But then at the final event, it's very different when you're live interacting with a system constantly, when you're defending a server live.
So, it's a different environment.
And I think that change is enough that it will give the teams who have been here before.
A leg up.
Of course, that said, every one of these teams, as I said before, they're all in the top 1%.
They're all very, very talented.
They've got a lot of the right technical skills in cybersecurity, reverse engineering, vulnerability research, cryptography, all these things that they're going to need.
So, it wouldn't be impossible to see a rookie do well.
And can you tell us a little bit about team sizes?
Are the teams that automatically have more people going to be at an advantage to the smaller teams?
Or is there such a thing as too many cooks in the kitchen?
So, this is something we think a lot about, like, in a lot of CTF design and especially CTFs.
CTFs are oftentimes designed not to incentivize just throwing a million people at something because it's kind of sort of lame.
You want, like, the leadest, best hackers to win.
But you also don't want to, like, penalize teams just because they're big.
And so, there's this kind of interesting balance.
I would say it is interesting looking at the numbers of the top eight teams that qualified here in the finals.
The smaller teams tend to be in the top half.
So, it's not strictly exactly that.
But certainly, most of the smaller teams are in the top four and then most of the larger teams.
And the team sizes can range anywhere from nine to well over 100.
So, there are some big teams.
There are some small teams.
What's more important than anything, though, is really about communication within your team, having a good sense of who's doing what, having roles and responsibilities.
And the bigger you get, the more, like, it's like any, like, small company.
Like, the bigger you get, the more you need an org chart and middle management and structure and stuff to kind of operate.
And so, that comes at, like, operational, like, drag and cost of efficiency.
So, I like a small team.
But certainly, there are sometimes advantages.
There are some advantages to having a big team.
So, Kevin, start small.
Find maybe 20 of your closest friends before you get into hack set four, right?
That's right. Definitely.
Help us out there.
Now, Jordan, I'm not a hacker.
I don't come from a hacking community.
I love this part of my job.
But I can relate things to other things I know, right?
Sports or anything else.
So, when we say capture the flag, I think of my old elementary school days, capture the flag out on the playground.
Is that really the direct example of what this competition is?
It actually is.
In fact, ironically, we use CTF, we use capture the flag in the cybersecurity community, as I said earlier, to describe a variety of events, of styles, like the offense, the defense.
The type of event we're running, this attack defense, where teams are both attacking and defending, is actually the true capture the flag.
It really is the original, you know, when we described capture the flag, we were talking about exactly that.
Because much like, you know, the elementary school game, I've got my systems I'm defending.
I have to keep my stuff working and running.
Keeping the runners out in the field.
But here, keeping my satellite functional and keeping people from being able to exploit me.
And then I also need to be going in and attacking my competitors.
I need to be going into their side and trying to steal their flags.
So, it actually is a really good analogy.
It's the reason that the name came about.
And even though we use it for these other events, it's funny that this is the type of event that actually the name came from.
So, it's essentially just a line of code that they would find in solving these challenges or attacking another team's satellite.
Yeah.
So, what those flags can look like is interesting and can change.
So, as Bryce was mentioning earlier.
There are some flags that are sort of automatically granted.
It's just the teams demonstrating, for example, that their satellite is operational and functional and transmitting data.
They don't take a piece of information and say, this is the flag, I got it.
It's just proving that they got it.
Interesting.
And then there are other challenges that are explicitly, yes, a piece of code.
In fact, they're base 64 strings.
Which just means some random piece of data turned into like all numbers and a couple of hexadecimal or a couple of letters.
All letters and numbers and plus a couple of extra characters.
So, that's what they actually look like.
Which is kind of a gibberish.
And then those, you take, you submit to a score server and that's your proof.
Yes, I got it.
So, some are automatically done just based on actions you take.
And some are things that you actually steal from your opponents or steal from a particular location and submit to a score server.
Wow.
Okay.
Interesting.
So, let's bring it back to, I'm in PE class and I just got divided into a team.
Are we starting the competition or before the competition in a huddle and saying, okay, guys.
We are going to focus on attacking and getting the guys in.
Getting the guys out there and grabbing flags and only two people hanging back.
Are there tactics like that that these teams are figuring out?
Yeah.
A lot of that comes down to the team structure and kind of composition.
And that's usually where you've identified kind of before and, okay, you're going to do, you know, reverse engineering.
You're going to do like satellite operations.
You're going to do and you've pre-identified a couple of people with particular roles.
But it's important to not as a, you don't as a team say we're just going to go all out attack or we're just going to go all out defense.
Because you have to do both.
And you have to both.
And they're related.
So, like, the information you learn as a defender is directly relevant to offense and vice versa.
And so the most successful attack, defense, capture the flag teams have really good coordination and communication between their offense and their defense.
You can be generally stronger with one or another.
There might be some things we probably won't see as much today.
But especially tomorrow, we will expect to see more of the, like, actual, like, real good hacks against other teams and stuff.
And so at the rate they're going, I actually am expecting that, which should be exciting.
But they could come earlier.
We don't really know.
And does it make it easier that they're all in the same room together?
They're all in the same room together, right?
It depends.
Actually, no.
Many of these teams are widely distributed.
Wow.
Okay.
So, yeah.
So, a lot of the teams are fully remote.
They're using Discord or Slack or some other, you know, communication mechanism to kind of keep in touch.
And that's part of why, like, a big team can be harder.
Because it's easy to lose fact that, like, three people are working on the same thing.
And one had the information the other one needed.
That happens quite a lot.
And it can be hard to kind of keep in touch.
So, if you can't, like, juggle that, it is better when you're in the same room.
I love being in a CTF, you know, with my fellow CTF players and kind of being able to, like, bounce things back and forth.
But for a lot of these teams, they're all over the world.
And so that's just, yeah, how they're used to working.
Interesting.
Wow.
How's your notes coming along?
You're going to start finding friends in Australia?
Keep them all in the U.S.?
Probably worldwide.
We'll let you figure that out.
Oh, it does help with time zones, by the way.
Having people in different parts of the world, it's interesting.
Like, your sleep schedules and lining things up, that's actually one advantage of it, too.
Good point.
Good point.
All right.
You got all that?
Yes, absolutely.
Cool.
Well, thanks so much, Jordan.
We appreciate all the details on the game.
There is a lot going on in this competition.
So, let's see how you, the audience, can follow along at home.
Hack-A-Sat 3, the final event.
For the best experience, be sure to tune in on our website, hackasat.com.
Already there?
Great.
Here are all the things you can do.
Check the schedule to see when our broadcasts are live.
Missed calls?
Missed a broadcast?
Catch up on our past broadcasts page.
Right on time?
Click to watch the live stream full screen.
Or minimize while you do other things, like check the leaderboard to know which team is winning.
Monitor the live points overview to see where teams are succeeding and where they are not.
Track the competition chatter on Twitter.
Download the original Hack-A-Sat 3 playlist so you can stay in the groove all day.
Buy some Hack-A-Sat merch.
Want to really launch into the competition?
Go to our competition visualization to monitor the position of the satellites.
You can see if their solar panels face the sun or where their telescope is pointing.
You can also see the locations of the ground stations and where their antenna cones are pointing and if they are transmitting.
You can also check the log to see the big events that happened in the game so far.
Want more?
Go ahead and review the rules and frequently asked questions.
Spend some time learning more about Hack-A-Sat, hacking, and hacking in space.
And even catching yourself up on Hack-A-Sat 1 and 2.
It's all here for you to learn space faster.
Enjoy the competition.
Okay, so we all know to go to hackasat.com and Twitter to keep up to date.
But now the teams have been on it for almost four hours now.
Are there any updates on the contest, Jordan?
Oh, there have been.
It's been exciting.
We alluded to this earlier when I had both Mark and Bryce on here.
But it has been really good.
And so again, as an organizer, you don't know how the teams are going to make progress.
Let's go ahead and jump over to my computer.
I've got the scoreboard.
Again, this is one that you can get just on the website yourself.
You can see the scores and where teams are at.
You'll see.
There's a good spread.
We've already seen a number of the top five teams are kind of spreading out.
And even though it looks like maybe the last three, Perfect Blue, Solar Wine, and Organize just haven't moved,
there has been some slight shifts.
There's been some differences in SLA back and forth.
But mostly, we're not seeing a lot of overall action from them.
I like to check out this scoreboard right here.
This is my favorite view.
This is a very traditional kind of CTF view.
You can see a lot more drama here, right?
This is not just like what is it now.
But we can actually see it.
We can see the rise of teams earlier.
So it started off at the very beginning when we had a big bump really early on by Poland Can at the beginning.
And then an even bigger one later on here.
They took a very early lead and led for quite some time.
This was them getting access to some of those ground stations that we mentioned earlier.
So we alluded to the fact that there is two ground stations that they're given at the beginning each team has access to.
Some of these extras have other challenges.
But let's go back to the very beginning and just talk about the very first thing that the teams did at the beginning of the day.
Their very first order of business was just being able to talk to the satellite.
Just being able to get in communication with it, to point their ground stations that they started with access at their satellite as it came by.
And we call this just the satellite communication category.
And it earned them some points.
First, I'm going to flip over to my Zoom out hot key.
We're going to flip over to the dashboard.
And you can see that.
Shown here on the downlink of data.
The teams will downlink data.
And if they're able to do that, that was going to give them points in that particular category.
And that required them to have the system able to communicate, which required some of the pointing.
Let's go ahead and queue up this introductory video for the satellite communications and see what teams were doing.
Unthinkable? Perhaps.
But only a dozen short years ago.
It had been unthinkable that man would ever orbit away.
Or go around Earth.
Or circumnavigate the Moon.
Challenge.
Teams start the event with a satellite they control and two ground stations to communicate with it.
These ground stations are equipped with S-band satellite dish antennas.
This type of antenna is directional in nature and must be pointed at the satellite to establish communications.
Teams must utilize the provided command and control software to orient their ground stations' antennas in an optimum fashion to achieve and maintain a link with the spacecraft.
The satellite should be able to communicate with any of the ground stations' antennas.
So, again, that was the first task for the competitors.
And you can see here back on the computer that the dashboard view that we've got here right on the website, this is changing even as we're speaking.
So we're seeing them go up and down.
We're seeing that their angular velocity, their wheel speed, the downlink data, these things are changing as they're interacting.
As they either don't do a full-time job.
anything with a satellite and it slowly degrades or as they're able to communicate with it they're
able to get it um tuned and operating at peak efficiency we have definitely seen uh at least
five of the teams last i checked in were able to really get uh communication and several of the
teams were not just communicating with their satellites but actually really trying to optimize
these parameters trying to actually get their wheel speed kind of under control get their angle
of velocity uh appropriate and it is interesting much of this game actually has trade-offs i think
this is this is uh one of the fascinating parts about this is that a lot of the decisions you
make like for example if you're going to like move your satellite a lot you're using your your wheel
that have like a spinning wheel inside of it that they're using to actually rotate it um but if you
rotate a lot you're going to potentially uh how much speed you have is going to decrease your
battery life like these are all related you can't just like get infinite amounts of one of these
levers and stuff like that you can't just like get infinite amounts of one of these levers and
knobs or another as you make a change to one you're going to impact some of the other ones
and so that'll come up even later when we talk about the ground stations because teams have to
choose are they talking to their satellite are they going to maybe later on try to use their
ground station access to attack another satellite but that if they do they miss a chance to
communicate with theirs and so these are all these these sort of trade-offs i think that's
as i said earlier that's the most exciting part about this year
when we go over to the uh the histogram again um or really just the the line chart
of scores over time uh because there's been there's been a lot of drama so like i said at
the beginning teams were just communicating we saw solar wine excuse me we saw uh poland can
actually solar wine was in dead last which is kind of funny because they were our top scoring
team uh in previous years and they were definitely a slower start at the beginning they actually
lost a little bit of sla while other teams were kind of more neutral and then we started to see
poland can has uh really made this big jump that jump was then getting access to additional ground
stations and so we talked about this earlier when you get access to these ground stations there's
just a big bucket of points just for doing it so just for proving that you have solved this
challenge you're going to be getting these points and then the question is can you leverage that
access to do other things so are you able to use the access not directly for points or for flags
but indirectly to give you more communication windows and so for example we saw uh poland
can just took over five at once so there's ten extra ground stations five of them have one
challenge uh they're calling it um coffee ground because they're ground stations and the other
one's called sacred ground so the two challenge names uh that the teams are are seeing on the
scoreboard and the coffee ground ground stations of which there were five uh where they just took
over like instantly usually you'll see a team kind of test it and try out uh and it was really
fun that was uh we actually heard in the broadcast room here uh this big like yell of like excitement
from the folks outside and that was poland can just owning five of these things just instantly they
try it you know they just like boom went out and did it we've seen other teams on the other hand
be more slowly and methodical they'll test it out they'll try it on one they'll move to the next
and actually because the way that the scoring works doing one at a time can actually be more
beneficial but it remains to be seen like how that's going to work although i will say that's
what happened here with single event upset single event upset figured out the same challenge that
poland came did but instead of bumping them all up you see the stair step right so this going up
slowly is them leveraging different ground stations and that might mean that you're able to
like follow your satellite right over the ground station instead of just getting like yeah we got
onto it all um and that has to do with some details about how the ground stations uh operate
that we'll we'll talk about a little bit later uh and then we'll also take a look at samurai who is
up here uh back in the finals they were here with us in year one didn't make it into the finals for
year two uh great showing from them they're not on the scoreboard here because they're getting
because they accessed a different component they were scoring uh on a service that we're calling
403 forbidden and so we'll go ahead and give you a summary of what the teams kind of were told what
this challenge is uh right here we stand on the threshold of a great new age of exploration
its ultimate destination the furthest reaches of the universe challenge a website on the
game network reveals the existence of a science payload on board the team's satellites
the payload sensor can collect data for missions broadcast by special science ground stations
the website gives a lot of details about how the missions work but the information needed to
receive transmissions from these ground stations is not accessible on the public website content
there appears to be more information available on pages requiring authentication
teams will need to find a way to access this critical information
before completing these missions and obtaining valuable points
so we're going to go ahead and go ahead and get started with our initial
video so i think it's really cool to watch what teams are actually doing so we've pulled up one
of the visualizations that has been made public and you can see uh it's actually using a tool
called cesium but it actually puts a whole 3d environment in your browser and lets you see
where these things are at what's going on and so this is actually from earlier in the day you can
actually scrub back and forth in time it's a little bit tricky to get the timing exactly right
but you can you can play through and actually watch uh where these cones are at and what they're
are these are the ground stations and where they're pointing you can actually
tell if they're trying to talk to their satellite and so if we look here the
satellites are coming in over the sky we look real kind of low we can see them
coming in over the horizon and those green flashes are one of the teams in
this case I believe it was a single event upset or space bits it was one of
the two here I can be a little bit hard to tell who is communicating with their
satellite and so we see this green flash that's them or at least
transmitting whether or not they received we can't see in this
necessarily whether or not it was a successful transmission but you can see
them trying to talk we'll be using that later to kind of keep track of what the
teams are doing and again you can you can check this out on online we'll make
sure we get that in Twitter on the website if it's not already directly
linked there so that's a super fun way to watch what's happening but but well
we'll spend some more time with that when we talk about ground stations later
so a whole bunch of other things that we're going to talk about in the next
video we're going to talk about how much has been happening in the game really
happy with the teams they're making great progress we're seeing lots of
solves we're seeing a diversity of solves we're seeing some teams I get
access to ground stations we're seeing some solve other challenges and we're
really hoping to see them really figure out the mechanics of controlling their
satellites and then how they're gonna work that kind of into the rest of the
gameplay so that's it for our kind of game update I can't wait to see what
happens awesome honestly one of the things that you touched on there we are
live in this room and so occasionally you'll see a bunch of people
go by really fast or they're cheering or they're making these noises and it's
exciting like what is happening so we're glad to have Jordan here with that live
scoreboard but of course he's wondering too I got to get out of here and really
get those details right exactly yeah thank you Jordan cool so sounds good on
our end thanks everybody and thank you to everyone tuning in from home and
competing around the world let's take a look at our broadcast schedule for the
rest of the weekend Steve and Eli will be up with a full recap of day one at
7 p.m. Pacific you can catch that live right here on
hackasat.com be sure to set your alarms but based on your time zone exactly and
keep up with our Twitter for any breaking info that we might want to
share with you you'll find Rachel and me back here tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.
Pacific to kick off the final day of competition and we'll finish tomorrow
with our awards ceremony and a finals analysis so be sure to stay tuned
thanks enjoy the broadcast later today we'll talk to you again soon
you
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