NASA shows how it will talk to spacecraft over 15 billion miles away | Mashable.
NASA shows how it will talk to spacecraft over 15 billion miles away
Six antennas pointed as an array at NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft. Credit: MDSCC / INTA / Francisco "Paco" Moreno |
We're going to need a bigger antenna.
For the first time, NASA's Deep Space Network — which communicates with the agency's legendary Voyager 1 spacecraft — pointed all six of the large antenna dishes at its Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex at the interstellar craft. Combining antennas together, aka "arraying," allows NASA to create a bigger overall antenna and pick up ever-fainter signals from Voyager 1, a craft over 15 billion miles away — and counting. Already, engineers need a five-antenna array to gather unprecedented data from a Voyager instrument.
"As Voyager gets further away, six antennas will be needed," the space agency explained in a statement.
Voyager 1 and 2, launched in 1977, have left the sun's influence and are the only human-built craft to enter interstellar space. So the data they're returning is invaluable.
"The science data that the Voyagers are returning gets more valuable the farther away from the Sun they go, so we are definitely interested in keeping as many science instruments operating as long as possible," Linda Spilker, Voyager’s project scientist, said last year
"As Voyager gets further away, six antennas will be needed."
The instrument that requires six antennas, the Plasma Wave System (PWS) instrument, detects the interstellar gas the craft are passing through.
NASA's Deep Space Network, or DSN, has three disparate locations spaced around Earth, allowing different missions to connect with the network (it currently supports over 40 space endeavors). They're located in Barstow, California, near Madrid, Spain, and near Canberra, Australia. "Madrid is the only deep space communication complex currently with six operational antennas (the other two complexes have four apiece)," the agency explained. "Each complex consists of one 70-meter (230-foot) antenna and several 34-meter (112-foot) antennas."
The Voyager craft, nearing a half-century of operation, may potentially return unprecedented science data through the mid-2030s, when they exhaust their finite nuclear fuel supply. Yet out in interstellar space, another threat looms, too: harmful radiation called galactic cosmic rays. These high speed particles, many of which are created by dramatic star explosions called supernovae, can trip Voyagers' memory, or permanently damage aging computers (which may have recently occurred). It's dangerous in the realm between the stars, billions of miles away.
"We are dodging bullets out there," Alan Cummings, a cosmic-ray physicist at Caltech — the research university that manages NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory — recently told Mashable.
Topics NASA
So basically California and Australia need 3 more and Spain needs 1 more. But as long as we have unlimited funds for these projects let's double California's and Australia's and triple Spains. That way we will be able to telephone these spacecraft for another 50 billion miles
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DeleteLine of sight...
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ReplyDeleteLong lasting spacecraft like the Voyagers are a lasting testament to the people that designed and built them and maintained them. And most of those people are long retired and many have passed away. The second generation of people at JPL are working with them now.
It’s amazing. And knowing the environment in which they sail, the designs are incredibly rugged. Thermal, radiation (internal and external), debris strikes….
At such distance from the Sun, how does Voyager 1 get its power?
ReplyDeleteSomething called a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG)! The thermoelectric effect allows certain junctions of different metals to convert the thermal energy in a temperature gradient into electrical energy. It's not super efficient, but it doesn't use any moving parts, and it's very reliable. Take a lump of plutonium to generate heat, surround it with thermoelectric junctions and put radiative cooling fins on the other side of the junctions, and you've got a power source that can provide electricity for literal decades without any external refueling or recharging.
DeleteThese are producing about 40% of the original power. Most than is the decay of plutonium which has a half life of 87 years. The rest due to other degradations.
DeleteWow. A built-in mini power plant. Simply amazing that this technology existed when Voyager was built and launched. Thank you so much!
DeleteIf you’ve ever seen/read The Martian, it’s the thing he puts in his rover to keep it warm.
DeleteAnd, an RTG will power the upcoming Dragonfly helicopter that will fly on Titan.
DeleteSolar panels are only useable out to Jupiter where the solar intensity is just 4% of Earth.
DeleteRTGs have been used on the Moon with long nights and Mars with sandstorms.
God that makes for one hell of an opener for a sci-fi novel.
ReplyDeleteFor 5 months in 2023/2024 contact with voyager 1 was lost and its memory wiped. On its return to transmissions, the wave of high pressure interstellar medium detected and tracked before the dropout had completely disappeared. This is the real story of what happened in those 5 months…..
Yet I can't get a refrigerator that doesn't implode after 4 years.
ReplyDeleteThere is an incredible amount of technology and forethought packed into a 70s era probe. Amazing
ReplyDeleteThe ground team sent a command up to Voyager 1 on Thursday to recode part of the memory of the spacecraft's Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), one of the probe's three computers...
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