“I may have pleaded guilty to felonies but in reality I was just a delinquent doing tons of misdemeanours.” But at the same time, I certainly don’t look at myself as though I was some type of super-sophisticated criminal who was trying to harm society,” he says. “It’s impossible to ignore my past – it is a key part of who Kevin Mitnick is. So much so that the claim was successfully used to help keep him in solitary confinement for eight months during a five-year prison sentence he served in the late 1990s.Īrguably the most famous hacker the world has seen to date, Mitnick was in Dublin this week to perform a live hack at the BT Young Scientist Exhibition at the RDS. But at one stage it was believed he might be capable of it. In the future, he also imagines that a large population of humans or robots on the moon or Mars will need to have their own tracking infrastructure a GPS-like constellation of satellites, equipped with tiny atomic clocks, could accomplish this.Kevin Mitnick doesn’t look like the kind of guy who could set off a nuclear missile just by whistling into a phone. “If you had a more stable clock that had less drift, you could decrease that kind of overhead,” says Ely. But according to Ely, these clocks aren’t nearly as stable-their drift needs to be corrected at least twice a day to ensure a constant stream of accurate information for everyone on Earth. On Earth, we use GPS, a network of satellites carrying atomic clocks that help us navigate on the surface.
It may prove useful for ground travel too. “However, for any constellation of satellites, there has to be a better clock at the satellite system’s ground station,” since this is how scientists monitor the accuracy of clocks in space. “It’s worth noting that when we consider space-system timekeeping, we often focus on the atomic clocks carried by the spacecraft,” he says. The JPL team’s version is the first one that’s both small enough to fit on a spacecraft and stable enough for one-way navigation to become a reality.Ĭamparo agrees, and says the device could even be configured to use on ground stations on Mars or the moon. Atomic clocks used to navigate from the ground are too big-the size of refrigerators-and current space clocks aren’t accurate enough to rely on. But there would be no need to bounce a signal back, because the subsequent navigation calculations could be done in real time onboard.
The craft will always need to receive an initial signal from Earth, in order to measure its position and direction from a constant point of reference. (Currently, uncrewed missions, like the Perseverance rover’s landing on Mars, rely on automated systems for navigation decisions that have to be made on short timescales.) The solution, the JPL team says, is to equip the spacecraft with its own atomic clock and eliminate the need for ground-based calculations. Far out into the cosmos, it would be impractical and unsafe to rely on this method, especially if the craft was carrying people. By the time you travel all the way out to the current location of the Voyager, a satellite exploring interstellar space, he says, it can take days.
But as you travel further out, the time required quickly becomes inefficient: near Mars, the round trip time is about 40 minutes, and near Jupiter, this increases to about an hour and a half. For objects near the moon, the two-way trip only takes a couple of seconds, Ely says. But the time it takes to send messages back and forth is a real limitation.