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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 Voyag
by InclinedPlane 9y ago
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 a huge amount of gain alone. It means that there is more area to collect signals from the spacecraft and it means that the beam from the ground station to the spacecraft is much tighter, concentrating the total transmission power into a smaller cross-sectional area at the distance of the spacecraft.
The spacecraft also uses error correcting codes, which involve transmitting many more bits than the underlying data, but in such a way that errors due to noise are not only detectable but correctable.
On top of all of that you have the state of the art low noise amplifiers in the DSN antennae. A typical low noise amplifier is a carefully built electronics assembly made by experts. The DSN amplifiers? They use 99.95% purity ruby rods chilled to 4 degrees above absolute zero to form microwave MASER based amplifiers.
There's a neat little video (series) here on the DSN and contacting the Voyagers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzRP1qdwPKw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzRP1qdwPKw
- femto 9y agoThere's also a neat book for those interested in the engineering details of their receivers: "Low-Noise Systems in the Deep Space Network" Edited by Macgregor S. Reid https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/monograph/series10/Reid_DESCANSO_sml-110804.pdf https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/monograph/series10/Reid_DESCAN... It's published by the JPL as part of the "Deep Space Communictions and Navigation Series". The rest of the books in the series, listed in the book's front matter, have some fascinating titles.
- quotemstr 9y agoThat's amazing.
- ufmace 9y agoCool video, thanks! They also mention this website[1] where you can see the status of the whole DSN live, what antennas in what locations are communicating with what spacecraft, with signal strengths and transmit powers and bitrates and all. They mentioned that the received signal from the Voyager spacecraft is actually stronger than the signals from several closer craft, because the Voyagers have such good antennas. The videos of their decoder screen brings back memories of doing very similar things with oilfield tools. The same sorts of techniques are used to get data from deep below the earth, though not with RF but mud pulse telemetry instead. Same digital encoding types and decoders. I got to work with the guys who designed all of the telemetry systems and wrote the decoders for that stuff too. [1] https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html