How To Contact The Voyager 2 Probe (PART 1)
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended in Voyager threads as the best look at how operators actually contact the probe.
What it is
Dave Jones of EEVblog and Richard Stephenson tour the 70m DSS43 dish at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex and explain how NASA talks to Voyager 2. It covers the transmitters, receivers and tracking involved.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2017 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends misterS · 2018-08 · on “Deep Space Network Now: Status of communications with our deep space explorers”
Dave Jones of EEVBlog has a nice series of videos talking to Richard Stephenson, Operations Supervisor at the DSN's Canberra site. How To Contact The Voyager 2 Probe: Part 1: [this video] Part 2: [LINK] Part 3: [LINK] (the playlist is a mess, and videos are unordered) There are also a couple of Behinde the Scenes videos.
Recommends 7373737373 · 2023-04 · on “NASA Power Hack Extends 45-Year Voyager 2 Mission Even Longer”
Video recommendation: How To Contact The Voyager 2 Probe ( [this video] ) and Pinging The Voyager 2 Probe ( [LINK] ) by EEVDiscover
Cites InclinedPlane · 2017-12 · on “After 37 years, Voyager has fired up its trajectory thrusters”
There are high gain antennas on both ends, and use of error correcting codes, as well as extremely high grade low noise amplifiers on the Earth side. The Voyagers have a 3.7m diameter parabolic radio dish, larger than the Hubble space telescope's mirror even. That alone provides a huge amount of gain on communications. Additionally, the spacecraft have 10s of watts of power available for transmitting signals, which is a fair bit considering (while on the other end the ground stations have up to hundreds of thousands of watts to transmit). The ground-stations in the deep space network (DSN) are tens of meters across, a small antenna is 34m, the biggest ones are 70m across. That also provides
Cites ncol · 2018-08 · on “JPL Open-Source Rover Project Based on the Rovers on Mars”
Haven't worked in this field, but here are some episodes discussing the topic: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [this video] I think what you are talking about is mostly just normal engineering in the sense that the process is similar. What really makes space unique isn't space as such but that there is no real-world (real-space?) testing, no inspections after the fact or do-overs.
Cites _trampeltier · 2020-11 · on “Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence”
Yes, there was even some new lately. "Voyager Spacecraft Detect an Increase in The Density of Space Outside The Solar System" [LINK] Dave Jones made a coupe of videos about the Deep Space Station in Canberra. [this video]
Cites mk_stjames · 2024-04 · on “NASA tries to jog Voyager 1's memory from 15B miles away”
Well, we need much more on our end than the power of a cellular signal- For instance, one of the support antenna dishes of the Deep Space Network is DSS-42 in Canberra... which is a 70 meter diameter parabolic dish. And the transmit power on our side is in the tens of kilowatts. Literally tens of thousands of times more power needed than a cell phone and directed by a 70 meter dish.... We need that because the dish on the Voyager probes is 'only' 3.7 meters. Still... not a cell phone antenna. That said, the transmit power of the Voyagers is tiny in comparison to ours and it is closer to that of the cell phone analogy- still more, however, at about 23 watts [1]. So, our end task of receiving