Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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The NASA field centre in Pasadena, California, operated under contract by the California Institute of Technology, which built and has continuously flown both Voyagers and which manages the Deep Space Network. Its distinctive contribution to this mission is institutional rather than technical: a flight team has been maintained without a break for forty-nine years, long enough that the engineers now writing commands were not born when the software they are editing was written, and the documentation for some 1970s subsystems has had to be reconstructed from paper archives and from retired staff.