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Jodrell Bank Telescope Gets No Signal From Beagle
tipiyano writes "Continuing the story of Beagle 2 from earlier today it seems like the hope for Beagle 2 surviving the landing at Mars is reducing as the Jodrell Bank telescope didn't receive any signal from Beagle. In the words of a mission manager, 'I wasn't too worried about the missed link with Odyssey, but it starts getting serious if Jodrell Bank cannot get a signal either'."
In the 60s (the peak era for electronics IMHO) 'they' were able to suck signals from space with a signal level of -160dBm and amplify them with a doohickey called a 'parametric amplifier', a really neat idea that consists of varying the capacity of a diode junction with a pump signal to get voltage gain. Ah, the 60s, when you could make things out of a single diode and land people on the moon with it.
And now in 2003 we can't even equal that with billions of transistors on an IC... Sad, really.
There isn't much on the net about parametric amplifiers sadly. Better hit the libraries and look for mouldy oldies, I have a great book with descriptions of the circuitry used for tracking Pioneer probes.
You know my boss wouldn't find that funny at all. A few years ago he worked on a joint project between the US and the USSR - a satellite named Skipper. Russians didn't believe in testing their flight hardware, only shadow building an identical one to destructively test. Skipper's solar panels were wired reverse of the battery so every rotation of the satellite the voltage would drop significantly and never quite come back up. Within' a minute or two the craft had shorted the batteries to the point the electronics no longer functioned.
He says it remains in its 800km orbit, mocking him every 45 minutes. According to my calculations it should only mock him every 101 minutes.