Slashdot Mirror
Busy Signals for Deep Space Experiments
lionchild writes "Just when you hated getting those 'Network Busy' signals on your Cell Phones..imagine what it's like to deal with communications in deep space after all these years of putting satellites and probes out there into the space lanes. Check the article out on space.com
" The saddest part is the poor state that the deep space network of dishes is in, with some of the 70 meter antennae approaching their fifth decade with no repair funds on the horizon.
So when your communication with your space probe doesn't make it, tell him you've seen him on commercials.
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
This has got to be a troll! Maybe if the sun was a couple of million times more massive...
It's a troll. Think about it -- we wouldn't be able to see the stars if the Sun's gravity well were strong enough to deflect extrasolar electromagnetic radiation.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Someone ought to tell those folks over at Space.com that the word antennae applies only to the sensory projections of an insect.
When you're talking about radio receivers, the plural of antenna is antennas.
It's in the dictionary if you don't believe me.
Hey, if they're planning to maybe scrap that antenna, i could use it for a couple of things... Like plastering it with mirrors and place my chicken dinner at the focal point... Or fill it with water and ejoy some quality scuba diving... Finally getting a good arena to play rollerball in... Or finally getting some quality broadcasting from India..
but i think beavis summed it up better than einstein
'the angle of the dangle is inversely proportional to the heat of the beat'
+1 informative?
The gravitational force is proportional to mass, but goes inversely squared with distance. So any local effect of a gravitational field on a light beam will diminish very quickly with distance. There is no 'light horizon' for the solar system. You could just as easily say that there's enough stuff out there to pull the light beam away from us.
Complete bunk.
Organisations putting up stuff that can potentially become space junk should have to pay a decommissioning fee upfront so that if they are unable to maintain the craft it gets taken down.
+1 informative?
The gravitational force is proportional to mass, but goes inversely squared with distance. So any local effect of a gravitational field on a light beam will diminish very quickly with distance. There is no 'light horizon' for the solar system. You could just as easily say that there's enough stuff out there to pull the light beam away from us.
Complete bunk.
I'm breaking up? ... Can you hear me now? ... Can you hear me now?
sig.
I know stuff breaks down, but these satellites are just up there. There's no wind or water to wear down the antennas. How much do these things actually break?
hmmm... " Solar System light horizon."
that might work a little further out, then it would almost be a "Universe light horizon".
Here's a link from Spaceflight Now concerning light in the universe:
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0205/24seeds/
Yeah that seems to make sense... ummm but you forgot the fact that the gravitational effect of mass is proportional to distance so the farther away the light got the lesser the effect of gravity. If many physicists (and they have a degree instead of a nickname;) believe that the universe is expanding fast enough so that the effect of gravity is decrease fast enough so the universe will NEVER stop expanding I think your "Solar System light horizon" *snicker*, maybe we should just call it an anti-event horizon, is a figment of your little troll infested imagination.
I stole this Sig
The antennas on the satellites are fine. The antenna dishes *on the ground* have been out in the weather for decades and need renovation.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
How many can be suprised about this phenomenom? We live in a very self-centric society that is more concerned about our own interests, unless if those interfere with ours. This is a widespread attitude in this country, reaching from the common man concerned about the television programming that those satellites are beaming down and obscuring some of the DSN antennas to those at NASA and the NSA, who have also put a great many objects into orbit, including those that are taxing the system beyond its capacity.
Scientists could continue to exacerbate the problem, as many have personal ideas about what is more important, their future NASA rovers or an improved method of keeping in contact with other projects. Funds diverted to repair and upgrade generally means that funds are diverted away from their projects, and few would readily give up funding. One of the ways to gain support for expansion and repair would have to convince people that investing in this now will have definite benefits in their projects later.
You zap the moderators with a wand of humor! The moderators resist!
Funny how a bunk statement is bunked by another bunk statement
(a) Photons are massless, so you can't use newtonian gravity F=GmM/r^2 to compute gravitation effects on it.
(b) There is no such thing as "stuff" out there to pull light beam away from us. That is even more completely bunk. According to your logic, the planets will be pulled away from us too.
(c) There is a light horizon from the solar system. It is but the future light cone of the event called the 'solar system' now in a space-time diagram. The word you want to use is "event horizon".
The more correct answer is that the curvature of space-time caused by the sun's mass is not enough to curve space upon itself, i.e. start with a photon, and the
photon will follow the curvature back onto the source. (Roughly speaking of course.)
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Just put Ham equipment on those things, and let us do the rest...
I'm sure we could get something to work.
-twb
At least here in Australia the big CSIRO-owned Parkes radio-telescope (also a 70-m dish, featured in the recent movie `the Dish') supplements the NASA DSN when needed. Last time I visited the site they were communicating with the Galileo Jupiter probe.As far as I know this antenna is well maintained, as it is also used for radio-astronomy research.
Meant as a response to http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=33380&cid=3606 402
re-posted there. Parent = -1 redundant
That was seriously the last thing I needed to see today. It's all downhill from there, I think.
What could top that?
I have been pwned because my
Ssssh! Don't tell these things! If NASA can't define the condition of the Deep Space Network as a 'problem', funds will never be allocated for a fix. "Oh, you have a workaround," Congress observes. "Then, the problem is already taken care of. Let's move on to the next item on the budget."
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The number of options for contacting a deep-space spacecraft (which includes anything beyond geo-synchronous orbit) are surprisingly limited - basically NASA's Deep Space Network, NASA's Tracking and Data Relay satellites, and then whatever time can be purchased on the various radio telescopes and ground stations around the world. For a spacecraft at Mars the signal is weakened by an inverse square factor of billions relative to near-Earth satellites, so you need highly directed large and sensitive receivers to hear anything. NASA has been upgrading the TDRS satellites but they aren't much use for really deep space missions because of their limited size. Except for commandeering Arecibo, the 70-meter DSN antennas are about all that's available right now...
Energy: time to change the picture.
from Sourceforge.
"We're sorry, please try your call again later."
... is not valid. Press 0 if you need assistance."
.. has been changed .. to an unpublished number."
.. mailbox number 2,942,213. At the tone, please leave your name and telephone number."
... "3rd ring of Jupiter."
"The number you are trying to reach, 3-0-5-1-3-4-5-2-3-5-2-4-6-2-1-6-3-7-4-4-8
"We're sorry, the number you are trying to call has been disconnected."
"All circuts are busy, please try your call again later."
"Please wait... while the NASA subsciber you are trying to reach is located..."
"That number, 5-4-7-2-7-1-0-8-6-2-3
"You have reached
"Your call could not be completed as dialed, please check the number and try again."
"Hello, Verizon information. What City and State please?"
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
This has made me think(what a wonderful new feeling)... Where is the site where you can buy property on the moon? if I could get a nice plot of dust on the far side, prefferably in a crater, I could FINALLY be free of USELESS SPAM! Of course, I wouldn't be able to receive any kind of communication, but maybe it's worth it?
How's ET supposed to phone home now?
I have never gotten this message on my cellphone when using any service (regular calling, wireless web, instant message.) What is it? Is the phone service provider's internet bandwidth saturated or something?
"We call it the traffic jam," said Bill Blume, mission design manager
We call it the slashdot effect.
Can you hear me now?
Gooooood...
;-)
What an interesting way to say "Right now, they're 30 years old."
Yes, if gravity were a particle then you could use newton mechanics, but its not, so you can't
this post doesn't even make sense, "stuff out there to pull the light beam away from us"....interesting science yet its gets a 2??
You don't have an e-mail or a web site, so I thought I'd ask:
How is ColdFusion and SQL server treating you? I read it in you bio.
The Deep Space Network (DSN) works well in a crisis mode, or when a spacecraft is doing something spectacular. It's not so good at the mundane day to day.
I used to work there, and then I worked for its "competition" in the US government. The DSN does a lot of non-criticial stuff that could be done cheaper elsewhere, either by other parts of the US government, or abroad, or by private industry. It has always been unwilling to off-load any of these routine tasks, even if the charge would be a fraction of what it costs the DSN to do it.
So I am not entirely sympathetic, at least until the DSN restructures and reinvents itself.
The space shuttle is well armored. Yet when the thing was origionally designed, nobody knew how common high velocity (but tiny) rocks would be up there. It turned out that the shuttle had insufficient armor to deal with micrometeorites for very long. That is why you see clips of the shuttle 'flying backwards' while in orbit. There is more armor on that side...
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
Of course, you wouldn't put it past ham radio people to build their own 70-metre dish if they really put their minds to it :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
"Huston, we have a...aww crap"
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
Okay, I'll rise to the trollish bait, but just because some of the refutations are little better than the parent. The simple way to refute his statement without getting overly involved is simply to point out that by his logic we would not be able to see any stars or galaxies. Duh.
Assuming that the antennae (note English spelling) are the expensive part, they why not buy up one or two from the Russians and stuff new signal processing equipment (aka computers) in them?
-AD
They must be using AOL.
I once read an article about how much of this was going to be solved by the use of a real deep-space communications network. The idea was to have them launch some relay satellites at some stable orbital points in the solar system, and instead of having ground stations here dedicated to communicating over these great distances, you'd ideally have a relay near your probe relay its transmissions back to earth. Once you get into deep space, you can start using more efficient optical methods for communicating between relays, and communication from earth basically just relies on your ability to get the message to the nearest relay satellite and let it route your message appropriately.
:/
All of this has the added benefit of allowing all of the various probes and interplanetary craft to be in communication at the same time.
Unfortunately, aside from the original paper I read, I haven't heard of anything more about these ideas. It's possible they've been tabled as too expensive for now..
It's a shame because I think this project would be really fascinating and could probably save a ton of money in the long run.
A true troll such as this one generates so many comments it boggles the mind, while causing many posters to make statements that are genuine, but dumb. The name itself is enough to be a giveaway. If there were a +ve troll mod, this would be one of the few to truly deserve it.
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
Hate to state the obvious, but always beating our chests with the "there is no money for science" theme is not bound to generate sympathy, especially when the poor and old DSN has just received the money to build a new 34m dish at the Madrid station.
:-(
Why not reading the article before spitting out the old song about money and science? Have you considered what state is the Russian deep space network now ? tracking is available only above Russia (which is probably 14 timezones, but is still barely 1/2 of what the DSN can do) and the mighty fleet of tracking ships has been sold for scrap metal. Heck, Russia can't even track objects in Earth orbit for the full span of the orbit! So think before posting!
-Muad'Dib
PS: If instead you told me that some of the 400bln tossed by Bush IInd in the Pentagon's budget could be spent better than just in funding the "military/industrial combine" Eisenhower was scared of, I totally agree. There is no match militarily for the US, but they *have* to spend 400bln in things that do not increase homeland security - why ? well, simply because the weapons/defense industry is filling the pockets of a congressman near you....
--- "I didn't think anyone would understand it" -Prof. Bob Muller
is gonna be screwed.
RA and dec are also mounted on what is commonly called an equatorial platform, meaning that the platform is offset so it can turn in synch with the rotation of the earth via a single drive while pointing at the same object. I'm not sure, but I think it's the declination axis that does this. Altitude (elevation) and azimuth must both alter at varying rates to track a celestial object. That being said, equatorial mounts are much larger and more expensive than alt/az ones, so many big scopes nowadays use the simpler mount with computer control to do the tracking.
In short, both alt/az and equatorial (RA/dec) are pointing strategies, but RA/dec is a coordinate system.
Tell you what, the astronomers here certainly wouldn't mind getting ahold of the DSN 70m dish at Tidbinbilla (near Canberra).
What is the inverse of the Matrix?
When i saw DSN i was instantly reminded of that dilbert continuity... lol dogbert static network.
nasa kept getting the following message everytime they activate the DSN
"DO NOT GO TO MARS"
"Laser light buckets could allow faster data rates than the biggest radio antennae on Earth, Miller said, but it does have its drawbacks.
"The concept looks very promising from a cost standpoint...but it can't get through clouds at all," he said, adding that to be effective, a number of ground sites would be needed to account for bad weather. "And it would all have to be developed from scratch, but it's possible that sometime in the next decade we could be using optical instead of radio frequencies."
"
"but it can't get through clouds at all"
Why can't we just use satellites to receive the 'optical' data and retransmit via radio or whatever the last 'mile' kinda like a DSL for deep space transmissions...
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
093:31:32 Parker: Apollo 15, Houston. (Long pause)
093:32:06 Irwin: Houston, 15.
093:32:07 Parker: Good morning, Jim. We're waking up you a little early to tell you a few things before you go around the corner because you only have four minutes in the old Flight Plan. So, if you guys are awake and ready to listen, I'll give you a few words.
093:32:23 Irwin: Okay, Bob. Go ahead.
093:32:25 Parker: Okay. At the moment - Okay, one short one. We'd like you to go High Gain Antenna to Auto so we don't lose you just before you go around the corner there. Okay...
093:32:49 Irwin: We're in Auto.
093:32:50 Parker: Jim - we seem to have atransmission problem on the High Gain Antenna - we want you to perform a systems check on your end...
093:32:55 (Sound of Irwin smacking co-pilot who is busy downloading the latests pics of Britney Spears fakes) Houston, I think we have isolated the problem, we are now clear for transmission...
-- Stamp out entropy. ->dryguy@bellsloth.net
there's no excuse for this.
50 year old communication hardware.
We shouldn't still be relying on outdated technology. Why have series of antennas and relays on each end and all points in between, when a simple telepath will do. Hell, even an empath can handle a fair bit of the communication - at least that needed to handle how things are going with the mission (though not mission control). A person on either end for each manned space entity would be loads cheaper - and for unmanned satellites/etc. we could just make use of our large supply of clairvoyants. Hell, why even have the satellite or whatever out there - we could just use a clairsentient/clairvoyant to observe distant things better than any machine could!
Why is our space program so behind on the times when we they have so much money!
--
oh - and yes - that's what we like to call a joke.
"Late in the next decade, they'll be 50 years old."
Late in the next decade, I'll be fifty years old. That, however, is close to twenty years away.
"We're sorry -- the space probe you have reached is not in service. Please check the coordinates and try again." *click*
Two tin cans and a reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally long ball of string, perhaps?
I remember working on an RFP that involved some DSN communication. From what I remember, the 70m dishes are going away. Yeah, a huge dish kicks ass, and the amount of bandwidth you can get is phenomenal (hundreds of kilobits on an interplanetary mission!!). However, you can get pretty much the same bandwidth by using the smaller 34m dishes in parallel. The 70m dishes were the old NASA approach of using a sledgehammer on a thumb tack. Modern electronics lets you do some fancy stuff, and it's a lot easier to install a few racks of equipment and use smaller dishes then keep the mechanics on the 70m dishes running. We're likely to not see many infrastructure improvements on the current DSN soon - they did a huge upgrade in the early/mid nineties.
Another real problem is acquiring enough bandwidth at the right time of day. DSN has three main locations because this little blue sphere we're on spins so fast. Scheduling all that communication isn't exactly easy.
----- obSig
For those to young to remember, the ALOHA protocol was the inspiration for the Ethernet protocol.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
The Big Problem at the Pentagon is Budget red-tape. Just about every Congressman wants a piece of Military Spending for thier state. More federal spending in thier state means more jobs and more votes.
Unfortunately two-thirds of the Budget are for stupid programs using obsolete technology or tactics, like the Crusader program. In order for the Pentagon to get what it really wants, it has to support all sorts of stupid and useless programs. Otherwise our elected officials won't approve it. So to spend 40 Billion to produce stuff that the Pentagon needs it needs to spend 400 Billion so that the Congress and Senate will pass the budget.
The irony of this is that the Senate and Congress were to prevent unnecessary military spending. Instead it has had the opposite affect by increasing it.
If you're really interested...
The Lunar Embassy is the place you're looking for. If you want to actually be involved in getting there, you might consider joining the Moon Society
Energy: time to change the picture.