this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Reading this article made me wonder if a satellite can be turned off and then back on. I've never really thought about how satellites are maintained and serviced. You can't exactly send IT up there to fix things.
You reboot the satellite, then it hits you with
/sbin/init does not exist. Bailing out, you are on your own now. Good luck.Linux has some dead pan humour system failure messages. Keeps things fun when everything goes to shit.
I did hit that one once. Or twice.
Make sense given it's open source.
Despite how much government and business use it gets, when you have someone like Linus torvalds at the helm you will get fun things.
The horror
At it's most basic, a satellite will have two systems. A highly robust command and control system with a fairly omnidirectional antenna. And then the more complex system that handles the payload(s). So yea, if the payload system crashes, you can restart it via C&C.
But if you could that is absolutely the first thing that they would try, turn it off and then back on
rarely and costly. one example is https://www.nasa.gov/content/hubbles-mirror-flaw
nasa seems to reboot things so I don't see why not. When they do though I think its really nail biting while they hope to hear from it again when it boots up.
Normally, they’re not fixed. They just let it crash very literally and send up a new one. NASA’s apparently working on repairable satellites.