We’re going to need a bigger antenna.
For the first time, NASA’s Deep Space Network – which communicates with the agency’s iconic Voyager 1 spacecraft – pointed all six major antenna dishes at its Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex at the interstellar spacecraft. By combining antennas, also called “arraying,” NASA can create a larger antenna overall and receive increasingly weak signals from Voyager 1, a spacecraft more than 15 billion miles away and counting. Engineers already need a five-antenna array to collect unprecedented data from a Voyager instrument.
“As Voyager goes further away, six antennas will be needed,” the space agency said in a statement.
NASA’s Voyager is in hostile territory. It’s all about dodging bullets.
Voyager 1 and 2, launched in 1977, have left the Sun’s influence and are the only human-built spacecraft to enter interstellar space. So the data they return is invaluable.
“The scientific data that Voyager sends back becomes more valuable the further away they get from the sun. “So we’re definitely interested in keeping as many scientific instruments operating for as long as possible,” Voyager project scientist Linda Spilker said last year
Destructible speed of light
“The further away Voyager is, the more six antennas are needed.”
The instrument, which requires six antennas, the Plasma Wave System (PWS), detects the interstellar gas through which the spacecraft fly.
The Deep Space Network’s Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex, where all six antennas are arranged together.
Photo credit: MDSCC / INTA / Francisco “Paco” Moreno
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NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) has three distributed locations around Earth, allowing various missions to connect to the network (it currently supports over 40 space projects). They are located in Barstow, California, near Madrid, Spain, and near Canberra, Australia. “Madrid is currently the only space communications complex with six operational antennas (the other two complexes have four each),” the agency explained. “Each complex consists of a 70-meter antenna and several 34-meter antennas.”
The Voyager spacecraft, which has been in operation for nearly half a century, could potentially provide unprecedented scientific data by the mid-2030s when its limited supply of nuclear fuel is exhausted. But there is another threat lurking out in interstellar space: harmful radiation known as galactic cosmic rays. These high-speed particles, many of which are created by dramatic stellar explosions called supernovae, can cripple Voyager’s memory or permanently damage aging computers (as may have happened recently). In the realm between the stars, billions of miles away, it is dangerous.
“We’re dodging the bullets out there,” Alan Cummings, a cosmic ray physicist at Caltech — the research university that manages NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory — recently told Mashable.