Voyager high-gain antenna

Assembled from 9 blocks · 2 evidence · 17 related

1. Story
2. The 3.7-metre parabolic dish that dominates each spacecraft's appearance and does all of its long-range talking. It must stay pointed at Earth to within a fraction of a degree, which is why attitude control and the thruster system, not the radio, are usually the limiting subsystem in old age. The link budget is the hardest number to intuit about this mission: the transmitter runs at a few tens of watts, the signal spreads over more than a hundred astronomical units, and what arrives at a Deep Space Network dish is a vanishingly small fraction of a watt, recovered only because the receiving antennas are enormous, cryogenically cooled and pointed with great precision. Downlink rates have fallen accordingly, to the order of a hundred bits per second. Not a place.
3. Knowledge
4. Voyager high-gain antenna
5. Connections
6. Voyager 1
7. Evidence
8. The canonical mission record for both spacecraft: launch dates of 20 August 1977 (Voyager 2) and 5 September 1977 (Voyager 1), the Titan IIIE-Centaur launch vehicle, Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral, the eleven-instrument science payload and the three-generator power system. V55 verification basis: THE CATALOGUE WAS NOT REACHED. nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov returned EGRESS_BLOCKED when fetched and the search budget was exhausted before it could be searched; the COSPAR designations and every fact attributed here come from standard mission record held in general knowledge, not from the catalogue. This record names where a curator should check, not what was checked.
9. The Deep Space Network comprises three complexes spaced roughly 120 degrees apart in longitude — Goldstone in California, Robledo de Chavela near Madrid and Tidbinbilla near Canberra — each with a 70-metre antenna and several 34-metre antennas; DSS-43 at Canberra is the only antenna capable of transmitting commands to Voyager 2, whose trajectory carries it far south of the ecliptic. V55 verification basis: THE PAGES WERE NOT REACHED — jpl.nasa.gov is blocked to this session and the search budget was exhausted. The DSS-43 uplink exclusivity is a widely reported fact that a curator should confirm, along with the dates of the antenna's 2020 upgrade outage.