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  Orbit ID — Trust the satellite. Trust the data.

🛰️ About the Project — Orbit ID ✨ Inspiration

Modern space systems rely heavily on satellite data for communication, navigation, research, and national security. However, most satellite identity management and telemetry verification systems are centralized, making them vulnerable to data tampering, single points of failure, and lack of transparent auditability.

The inspiration behind Orbit ID came from a simple question:

How can we trust satellite data when the source itself cannot be independently verified?

By combining blockchain immutability, cryptographic hashing, and decentralized storage, Orbit ID aims to bring trust, transparency, and verifiability to satellite identity and telemetry data — where accuracy is mission-critical.

What We Learned

Through building Orbit ID, we gained hands-on experience and deeper understanding of:

Smart contract development using Solidity

Deploying contracts on Polygon Amoy Testnet

Using Hardhat with ethers v6

Designing decentralized identity systems

Leveraging IPFS for off-chain data storage

Understanding how cryptographic hashes ensure data integrity

Structuring blockchain applications for real-world, high-trust use cases

We also learned how to design systems that balance on-chain verification with off-chain scalability.

🛠️ How We Built the Project

Orbit ID is built as a modular blockchain-based system consisting of two core smart contracts:

1. Satellite Registry

Each satellite is registered with a unique on-chain identity.

Metadata such as NORAD ID, owner address, public key, and IPFS references are stored.

Once registered, a satellite’s identity becomes immutable and verifiable.

1. Telemetry Verifier

Telemetry data is hashed using cryptographic functions:

dataHash

keccak256 ( telemetry data ) dataHash=keccak256(telemetry data)

The hash and metadata are stored on-chain, while full telemetry data is stored on IPFS.

This ensures that even a single-bit modification in data can be detected.

The system is deployed on Polygon Amoy, enabling fast, low-cost transactions suitable for real-time telemetry submissions.

🚧 Challenges We Faced

Environment setup issues while configuring Hardhat with specific versions (ethers v6, Solidity 0.8.20)

Understanding the differences between legacy and modern ethers v6 APIs

Designing smart contracts that are simple yet extensible for future upgrades

Ensuring compatibility between multiple deployed contracts

Handling deployment and debugging on a live test network

Each challenge improved our understanding of decentralized development and strengthened the final architecture.

🌍 Impact & Future Scope

Orbit ID lays the foundation for a trustless verification layer for space infrastructure. In the future, the platform can be extended to support:

Cryptographic signature verification of telemetry

DAO-based satellite governance

Cross-chain verification

Integration with space agencies, research institutions, and defense systems

🚀 Conclusion

Orbit ID proves that blockchain is not just for finance — it can secure the future of space. By bringing decentralized identity and verifiable telemetry to satellites, Orbit ID creates trust where failure is not an option.

Built With

• amoy
• contracts
• dotenv
• ethers.js
• hardhat
• ipfs
• openzeppelin
• polygon
• solidity