if you roll a large coin
around the dish, how long would it take to drop into the hole in the center? Is there an Olympic swimming pool / Astronomical Unit / Signal Strength unit?
Thanks for the upgrade!
NASA has successfully communicated with the Voyager 2 probe after an eight-month hiatus. The long break in conversation was due to necessary maintenance work on the only Earthly antenna capable today of sending signals to the probe, an effort that until now paused communications with Voyager 2. The antenna in question is …
Just a quick reminder of https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html :-)
Yes, until the only available antenna gets infested with dropbears and no can use it until they fought through all of XXXX malvolent fauna[1], flora and rocks to restore it into usable condition.
On a more serious note:
Having only one of something important is not a good idea, no matter how good of a job one does.
[1] minus some of the sheep
> Having only one of something important is not a good idea
Wait till even that single one gets its funding cut, because "waste of taxpayers' money" and "5G is better".
Science isn't sexy nowadays, and space even less. While a lot of little boys in our generation dreamed of becoming astronauts, nowadays their dream is becoming a "gangsta"...
Mumble mumble. Get off my lawn. Mumble.
Yes, until the only available antenna gets infested with dropbears and no can use it until they fought through all of XXXX malvolent fauna[1], flora and rocks to restore it into usable condition,
I would think that it would burn off the flora and fauna that might get on top of it. Sort of like a giant microwave oven.
The first question is who is going to fund it. If it's NASA, what projects would they have to cut? The other logical player is China but that brings its own problems.
The second question is where do you build it. Australia would be a bad choice because you'd want to separate the two. As far as stable democracies I would guess that New Zealand and Chile would be logical.
that they can still communicate with it. Current signal strength is -157dBm. Incredible.
Bit rate is 159 b/sec, meaning it takes 70 seconds to send 1Kb (1024 bytes) of data, assuming 11 bits of data per byte - 1 start bit, 8 bits of data, one parity bit, one stop bit. To be honest though, it could take longer than that as they will be transmitting the data in such a way as to be able to reconstruct missing/garbled bits of serial data, which means introducing redundancy. But let's not talk about Hamming codes this early in the morning! Let us instead delight in the ingenuity and dogged determinedness of others to keep those lonely old probes in comms. Every time I think about Voyager it humbles me. Incredible.
@ForthIsNotDead
I completely agree.
Still don't understand though with all this technology that gets a network link 17.7Tm away, then how come we still struggle to get a mobile phone signal in large parts of the world or even have bad wifi coverage within our own houses.
I guess its just one of the trade-offs of people not wanting to have a huge dish on top of their mobile phone or in their lounge and wanting a data rate to the Internet that is a bit higher than 159b/sec :-)
* Yes, I know it gets smaller as the data rate goes up.
> I can’t run a modern phone without weekly updates
Yeah well, the difference is profit. NASA hardware wasn't built for profit, so it just works.
On the other side our modern phones are solely built for profit, so they only have to work till the warranty ends, after which they should break down so you have to buy a new one.