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Voyager 2: Communication Reestablished With One Big Shout

August 4, 2023 by 35 Comments

You could practically hear the collective “PHEW!” as NASA announced that they had reestablished full two-way communications with Voyager 2 on Friday afternoon! Details are few at this point — hopefully we’ll get more information on how this was pulled off, since we suspect there was some interesting wizardry involved. If you haven’t been following along, here’s a quick recap of the situation.

As we previously reported, a wayward command that was sent to Voyager 2, currently almost 19 light-hours distant from Earth, reoriented the spacecraft by a mere two degrees. It doesn’t sound like much, but the very narrow beamwidth on Voyager‘s high-gain antenna and the vast distance put it out of touch with the Canberra Deep Space Network station, currently the only ground station with line-of-sight to the spacecraft. While this was certainly a problem, NASA controllers seemed to take it in stride thanks to a contingency program which would automatically force the spacecraft to realign itself to point at Earth using its Canopus star tracker. The only catch was, that system wasn’t set to engage until October.

With this latest development, it appears that mission controllers weren’t willing to wait that long. Instead, based on what was universally referred to in the non-tech media as a “heartbeat” from Voyager on August 1– it appears that what they were really talking about was the use of multiple antennas at the Canberra site to pick up a weak carrier signal from the probe — they decided to send an “interstellar shout” and attempt to reorient the antenna. The 70-m DSS-43 dish blasted out the message early in the morning of August 2, and 37 hours later, science and engineering data started streaming into the antenna again, indicating that Voyager 2 was pointing back at Earth and operating fine.

Hats off to everyone involved in making this fix and getting humanity’s most remote outpost back online. If you want to follow the heroics in nearly real-time, or just like watching what goes on at the intersection of Big Engineering and Big Science, make sure you check out the Canberra DSN Twitter feed.

Voyager Command Glitch Causes Unplanned Pause In Communications

July 29, 2023 by 31 Comments

Important safety tip: When you’re sending commands to the second-most-distant space probe ever launched, make really, really sure that what you send isn’t going to cause any problems.

According to NASA, that’s just what happened to Voyager 2 last week, when uplinked commands unexpectedly shifted the 46-year-old spacecraft’s orientation by just a couple of degrees. Of course, at a distance of nearly 20 billion kilometers, even fractions of a degree can make a huge difference, especially since the spacecraft’s high-gain antenna (HGA) is set up for very narrow beamwidths; 2.3° on the S-band channel, and a razor-thin 0.5° on the X-band side. That means that communications between the spacecraft and the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex — the only station capable of talking to Voyager 2 now that it has dipped so far below the plane of the ecliptic — are on pause until the spacecraft is reoriented.

Luckily, NASA considered this as a possibility and built safety routines into Voyager‘s program that will hopefully get it back on track. The program uses the onboard star tracker to get a fix on the bright star Canopus, and from there figures out which way the spacecraft needs to move to get pointed back at Earth. The contingency program runs automatically several times a year, just in case something like this happens.

That’s the good news; the bad news is that the program won’t run again until October 15. While that’s really not that far away, mission controllers will no doubt find it an agonizingly long time to be incommunicado. And while NASA is outwardly confident that communications will be restored, there’s no way to be sure until we actually get to October and see what happens. Fingers crossed.

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Hackaday Links: March 27, 2022

March 27, 2022 by 15 Comments

Remember that time back in 2021 when a huge container ship blocked the Suez Canal and disrupted world shipping for a week? Well, something a little like that is playing out again, this time in the Chesapeake Bay outside of the Port of Baltimore, where the MV Ever Forward ran aground over a week ago as it was headed out to sea. Luckily, the mammoth container ship isn’t in quite as narrow a space as her canal-occluding sister ship Ever Given was last year, so traffic isn’t nearly as impacted. But the recovery operation is causing a stir, and refloating a ship that was drawing 13 meters when it strayed from the shipping channel into a muddy-bottomed area that’s only about 6 meters deep is going to be quite a feat of marine engineering. Merchant Marine YouTuber Chief MAKOi has a good rundown of what’s going on, and what will be required to get the ship moving again.

With the pace of deep-space exploration increasing dramatically of late, and with a full slate of missions planned for the future, it was good news to hear that NASA added another antenna to its Deep Space Network. The huge dish antenna, dubbed DSS-53, is the fourteenth dish in the DSN network, which spans three sites: Goldstone in California; outside of Canberra in Australia; and in Madrid, where the new dish was installed. The 34-meter dish will add 8% more capacity to the network; that may not sound like much, but with the DSN currently supporting 40 missions and with close to that number of missions planned, every little bit counts. We find the DSN fascinating, enough so that we did an article on the system a few years ago. We also love the insider’s scoop on DSN operations that @Richard Stephenson, one of the Canberra operators, provides.

Does anybody know what’s up with Benchy? We got a tip the other day that the trusty benchmarking tugboat model has gone missing from several sites. It sure looks like Sketchfab and Thingiverse have deleted their Benchy files, while other sites still seem to allow access. We poked around a bit but couldn’t get a clear picture of what’s going on, if anything. If anyone has information, let us know in the comments. We sure hope this isn’t some kind of intellectual property thing, where you’re going to have to cough up money to print a Benchy.

Speaking of IP protections, if you’ve ever wondered how far a company will go to enforce its position, look no further than Andrew Zonenberg’s “teardown” of an anti-counterfeiting label that Hewlett Packard uses on their ink cartridges. There’s a dizzying array of technologies embedded inside what appears to be a simple label. In addition to the standard stuff, like the little cuts that make it difficult to peel a tag off one item and place it on another — commonly used to thwart “price swapping” retail thefts — there’s an almost holographic area of the label. Zooming in with a microscope, the color-shifting image appears to be made from tiny hexagonal cells that almost look like the pixels in an e-ink display. Zooming in even further, the pixels offer an even bigger (smaller) surprise. Take a look, and marvel at the effort involved in making sure you pay top dollar for printer ink.

And finally, we got a tip a couple of weeks ago on a video about jerry cans. If that sounds boring, stop reading right now — this one won’t reach you. But if you’re even marginally interested in engineering design and military history, make sure you watch this video. What is now known to the US military as “Can, Gasoline, Military 5-Gallon (S/S by MIL-C-53109)” and colloquially known as the NATO jerry can, started life as the Wehrmacht-Einheitskanister, a 20-liter jug whose design addresses a long list of specifications, from the amount of liquid it could contain to how the cans would be carried. The original could serve as a master class in good design, and some of the jugs that were built in the 1940s are still in service and actively sought by collectors of militaria. Cheap knockoffs are out there, of course, but after watching this video, we’ve developed a taste for jerry cans that only the original will sate.

After Eight-Month Break, Deep Space Network Reconnects With Voyager 2

November 12, 2020 by 48 Comments

When the news broke recently that communications had finally been re-established with Voyager 2, I felt a momentary surge of panic. I’ve literally been following the Voyager missions since the twin space probes launched back in 1977, and I’ve been dreading the inevitable day when the last little bit of plutonium in their radioisotope thermal generators decays to the point that they’re no longer able to talk to us, and they go silent in the abyss of interstellar space. According to these headlines, Voyager 2 had stopped communicating for eight months — could this be a quick nap before the final sleep?

Thankfully, no. It turns out that the recent blackout to our most distant outpost of human engineering was completely expected, and completely Earth-side. Upgrades and maintenance were performed on the Deep Space Network antennas that are needed to talk to Voyager. But that left me with a question: What about the rest of the DSN? Could they have not picked up the slack and kept us in touch with Voyager as it sails through interstellar space? The answer to that is an interesting combination of RF engineering and orbital dynamics.

Continue reading “After Eight-Month Break, Deep Space Network Reconnects With Voyager 2” →

NASA Making Big Upgrades To Their Big Dish DSS43

July 13, 2020 by 16 Comments

When it comes to antenna projects, we usually cover little ones here. From copper traces on a circuit board to hand-made units for ham radio. But every once in a while it’s fun to look at the opposite end of the spectrum, and anyone who craves such change of pace should check out DSS43’s upgrade currently underway.

Part of NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) built to communicate with spacecraft that venture far beyond Earth, Deep Space Station 43 is a large dish antenna with a diameter of 70 meters and largest of the Canberra, Australia DSN complex. However, the raw reflective surface area is only as good as the radio equipment at its center, which are now outdated and thus focus of this round of upgrades.

The NASA page linked above offers a few pieces of fun trivia about DSS43 and its capabilities. If that whets an appetite for more, head over to Twitter for a huge treasure trove. Whoever is in charge of Canberra DSN’s Twitter account has an endless fountain of facts and very eager to share them in response to questions, usually tagged with #DSS43. Example: the weight of DSS43 is roughly 8.5 million kilograms, 4 million of which is moving structure. They also shared time lapse video clips of work in progress, one of which is embedded after the break.

Taking the uniquely capable DSS43 offline for upgrades does have some consequences, one of which is losing our ability to send commands to distant interplanetary probe Voyager 2. (Apparently smaller DSN dishes can be arrayed to receive data, but only DSS43 can send commands.) Such sacrifices are necessary as an investment for the future, with upgrade completion scheduled for January 2021. Just in time to help support Perseverance (formerly “Mars 2020”) rover‘s arrival in February and many more missions for years to come.

Continue reading “NASA Making Big Upgrades To Their Big Dish DSS43” →

Clock Monitors Deep Space Network, Keeps Vigil Over Lost Mars Rover

October 7, 2018 by 7 Comments

It’s been a long, long time since we heard from Opportunity, the remarkable Mars rover that has shattered all expectations on endurance and productivity but has been silent since a planet-wide dust storm blotted out the Sun and left it starved for power. Right now, it’s perched on the edge of a crater on Mars, waiting for enough sunlight to charge its batteries so it can call home. All we can do is sit, and wait.

To pass the time until Opportunity stirs again, [G4lile0] built this Deep Space Network clock. Built around an ESP32 and a TFT display, the clock monitors the Deep Space Network (DSN) website to see if mission control is using any of the huge antennas at its disposal to listen for signals from the marooned rover. If the DSN is listening, it displays a special animation exhorting the rover to phone home; otherwise, it shows which of the many far-flung probes the network is communicating with, along with a slideshow of Mars mission photos to keep the spirits up. When the day finally comes that Opportunity checks in, an alarm will sound so [G4lile0] can pop the champagne and celebrate with the rest of us.

We realize that the odds that Opportunity will survive this ordeal are decreasing by the Sol. It’s an uphill battle; after all, the machine was 55 times its original 90-day design life when it went dark, so it’s an uphill battle. Then again, it has beaten the odds before, so there’s still hope.

Continue reading “Clock Monitors Deep Space Network, Keeps Vigil Over Lost Mars Rover” →

Serious DX: The Deep Space Network

July 21, 2017 by 28 Comments

Humanity has been a spacefaring species for barely sixty years now. In that brief time, we’ve fairly mastered the business of putting objects into orbit around the Earth, and done so with such gusto that a cloud of both useful and useless objects now surrounds us. Communicating with satellites in Earth orbit is almost trivial; your phone is probably listening to at least half a dozen geosynchronous GPS birds right now, and any ham radio operator can chat with the astronauts aboard the ISS with nothing more that a $30 handy-talkie and a homemade antenna.

But once our spacecraft get much beyond geosynchronous orbit, communications get a little dicier. The inverse square law and the limited power budget available to most interplanetary craft exact a toll on how much RF energy can be sent back home. And yet the science of these missions demands a reliable connection with enough bandwidth to both control the spacecraft and to retrieve its precious cargo of data. That requires a powerful radio network with some mighty big ears, but as we’ll see, NASA isn’t the only one listening to what’s happening out in deep space. Continue reading “Serious DX: The Deep Space Network” →