50 Years Later, This Apollo-Era Antenna Still Talks to Voyager 2
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
"It's Quieter in the Twilight": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
Interesting piece on a bit of the history of the Voyagers, as well as recent interviews with the handful of remaining folks dealing with Voyager today (well, as of 2021/2022).
https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/monograph/mono.html
Thirteen volumes about everything from deep-space tracking and navigation to cryogenic low-noise amplifiers, all available for free online. It's an amazing resource.
[NASA unmanned landing craft just touches down on mars] [Houston Control]: "What's that flare? See it? A green flare, coming from Mars, kind of a green mist behind it. It's getting closer. You see it, Bermuda? Come in, Bermuda! Houston, come in! What's going on? Tracking station 43, Canberra, come in, Canberra! Tracking station 63, can you hear me, Madrid? Can anybody hear me? Come in, come in!" [instrumental music suddenly stops]
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPHEbh7cnr561iJqxno3q...
The Viking missions to mars had started planning in the late 1960s and Viking 1 and 2 landed on Mars in 1976 so the inclusion of a NASA Mars landing in Epilogue 2 was pretty neat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dish
Worth a watch.
The radio telescope at Parkes was built prior to DSS-43 that is the article's subject, they're located approx. 4 hours drive apart.
While doing that I’d either enlist in the US Navy or US Army and work my way into a SIGINT job. Once you’re in a SIGINT job, you’ll be far too busy with radio for ham. This would be a fast track into SIGINT.
After that I’d use my military career to get into the private sector SIGINT world, as there’s a well-worn path there.
Related, Deep Sky Videos did a series of large-telescope tours / interviews a few years back. For example, this is their one on Alma; there are a number of others in their channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAQZp6yTR2Q
Bob: All I want is to stand tall, looking at the sun.
Alice: Your shade hits me, Bob. Prepare to die.
What's strange is acknowledgement of the possibility of scarce resources necessitating conflict is considered invalid criticism that needs to be silenced or given negative reviews by the majority opinion. But that's not really surprising when things like ascetic religion were created as a reaction to what is popularly called criminal or antisocial mental models of the world.
That can be divided by 60 into degrees, which are 0.0174532925199 radians
Those can be divided by 60 into minutes, which are 0.0002908882086 radians
Those can be divided by 60 into seconds, which are 0.00000484813681109 radians
Those can be divided by 60 into thirds, which are 8.08022801849E−8 radians
I think going any further is likely to be meaningless in a modern context, but fourths and fifths were used in the past.
For an arcsec, the square sin is ~85e-9. At the distance of the Moon, that means the signal occupies ~400km^2. At the distance of the Sun, ~5 billions of km^2 (5Mm^2).
The signal intensity is inversely proportional to that area.
One arcminute is about the resolution of the human eye. That is, if two points are less than 1 arcminute apart on the your field of view, they appear as one point.
The moon is 30 arc minutes (1/2 degree) on your field of view, that's why one can see the details of the surface with the naked eye.
18 arcseconds is about the size of Saturn (without the rings) as seen from the earth. It means it is just precise enough to shoot through the rings of Saturn. You can't see this without magnification, like with a small telescope or a good pair of binoculars.
This should be a global effort and I’ve read many articles about the lack of funding for the DSN. It’s getting more and more difficult to “juggle” and do proper time sharing in order to keep communicating with all the existing (and coming) spacecraft.
More resources and funding should be put together, by all space agencies (NASA, ESA, JAXA, ISRO…) so as to continue having means of communicating with all these space probes.
It really isn't a good filter for anything except "makes money quickly". Plenty of science returns zero economic benefits for years, even decades, but that doesn't mean it's useless.
How do you figure? We stand in a nation built on giant economic long shots and in the only one that managed to put humans on the moon in a joint government commercial venture.
I'm using an open source product to write this to you. Running on an open source operating system. Also on an open source hardware device. Where's the "quick money" in any of this?
> but that doesn't mean it's useless.
It doesn't mean it's useful either. You can't use a simple "expectation factor" divorced from all other reality to decide how to spend tax money.
Where's the capitalism in open source? Yes, yes, Red Hat, Microsoft etc all have their hands in it, but the very idea is anticapitalist.
>You can't use a simple "expectation factor" divorced from all other reality to decide how to spend tax money.
It's a bit more complicated than that, but plenty of countries outside the US spend money on things without tangible economic benefit.
America wins for a reason in geopolitical history and it's because it has a secret military on top of its apparent military. Air forces and scientists are just fungible tokens for a surreptitious right wing shadow government that competes with ankle biting bugs like neo-Marxists. But it can all be reduced to undignified gang banging like Crips and Bloods, because space colonization isn't as noble as the romantic fictions have showed it to be. Maybe the correct inference from knowledge of history is that humanity isn't the end goal to chase after?
There is no capitalism as such it is a communism or. We have mix system always. War, love, gov, politics, … even old communist found relative autonomy and over determination (and once on that no point to say ultimate we believe communism or capitalism will determine as things keep on going, end never comes).
Btw totalitarianism is the worry. Once you are in especially media (india starting china and Russia telling) good luck. That is the worry. Not politics, market, war, … alone.
Multi dimensional life and sometimes believe me one guy can do a lot. Rip, steve.
As an aside, the "free market" doesn't actually exist, something people with even a basic financial and civics education should trivially realize.