4 ms·

I imagine it'd certainly employ some type of beamforming at the least.

• wongarsu 2y ago
  Assuming you don't need fast steering, is a 3.7m transmitter array doing beamforming really better than a 3.7m dish transmitting at the same power? My intuition would have been that you are better off using a fairly standard transceiver and spending your engineering budget either increasing power or getting a bigger dish (either by launching on a wider rocket or with a folding design). Lasers might interesting for the downlink, but receiving a laser signal on the probe sounds difficult (earth is pretty bright).
  • outworlder 2y ago
    There's some value in getting rid of mechanical devices (or reducing the need to rotate the entire spacecraft).
  • cycomanic 2y ago
    Diffraction scales inversely proportional to wavelength so you gain significantly by going to optics, i.e. you can use a much smaller aperature in optics.
  • CamperBob2 2y ago
    The array doing beamforming can be spread out much farther. If the DSN were being built now, I'd think its antennas would look more like the Square Kilometer Array.
    • magicalhippo 2y ago
      Seems they're already on to something like that[1][2]: We envision deployment in three sites at or near the longitudes of the existing DSN sites. As an example, a potential initial phase could deploy 40 12-m elements at each complex to duplicate the X-band performance of a DSN 70-m antenna. Second and third phase deployments may bring the number of 12-m antennas to 200, then perhaps 400 per complex. [1]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4374100 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4374100 [2]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4374103 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4374103