Once upon a time there was a small satellite. Its creators from TU Berlin christened it Beesat-1 and launched it into a comparatively high orbit over 700 kilometers from Earth using an Indian rocket in autumn 2009. It was not only intended to serve as a model for a whole family of other Beesats, but also to prove that mini or pico satellites weighing less than one kilogram can perform similar technological functions to their big brothers. But in 2013, the celestial body was no longer good for anything. It could no longer send any useful data back to the university. With a few tricks, a resourceful hacker managed to repair the flying object from the ground despite the update mechanism not working and presumably make it fully functional again for the next 20 years.
What sounds like a fairy tale is reality, as the hacker PistonMiner revealed on Saturday at the 38th Chaos Communications Congress (38C3) in Hamburg. Beesat-1 was launched into space as one of the early, just hand-sized CubeSats, which have external dimensions of around 10 × 10 × 10 cubic centimetres. Its main purpose was to demonstrate the performance of newly developed, miniaturized reaction wheels and other technologies for pico satellites.
In 2011, Beesat-1 began transmitting invalid telemetry data for the first time. The developers were particularly interested in this automatically collected raw information. After a short time, the operators switched to the second on-board computer, after which the corresponding communication module sent the coveted data back to Berlin. In 2013, however, the problem also occurred on the second computer. The TU researchers had no choice but to largely cease operations. They only checked every few years whether the satellite was still responding to commands.
