Abstract
At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Space Flight Operations Center one day in 2003, the communications traffic arriving from NASA’s Deep Space Network was intense but not atypical. Any nation with interplanetary spacecraft to be monitored rents time on the network, whose terrestrial tracking stations pluck the data out of the sky and distribute them as needed. Twelve thousand dollars a minute will buy you DSN access, a nontrivial but essential price to pay for keeping a spacecraft healthy. On this sunny Pasadena morning, the Center was also tracking a number of missions run by JPL itself. The Galileo spacecraft was speeding away from an encounter with Jupiter’s moon Amalthea, a digital display counting time upward from the event on a screen overlooking the room. Another timer counted down the launch of SIRTF, the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, which would take place some seventy-five days later. A continuously updating screen tracked the DSN’s schedule, a marker for each antenna intersecting the colored lines marking different spacecraft on the chart.
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Notes
“for Internet communications.”— Ben Iannotta, “Earth, You’ve Got Mail,” New Scientist 162, issue 2187 (May 22, 1999): 32.
“one-tenth the speed of a broadband Internet connection.”—David F. Carr, “The too Million Mile Network,” Baseline no. 27 (February 2004), 24–26.
“a tenth of that is likely to be usable.”—Telephone interview with James Lesh, December 19, 2002.
“Voyager could deliver from Neptune.”—Lesh cites this figure in Marvin J. Wolf, “From Rocketeers to Solar Sailors: At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Scientists Are Building Robots to Explore the Solar System—and Even Making Plans to Sail to the Stars,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, November 14, 1999.
“to Earth by radio.”—A. T. Lawton and P. P. Wright, “Project Daedalus: The Vehicle Communications System,” Project Daedalus Final Report, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (1978), pp. S163—S171.
“deep-space missions in coming decades.”—Keith A. Beals et al., “Project Longshot: An Unmanned Probe to Alpha Centauri,” NASA/USRA University Advanced Design Program Project Report for 1987–1988, U.S. Naval Academy.
“into a much tighter beam.”—Robert Zubrin offers a clear explanation of this and many other issues in Entering Space (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1999), pp. 260–61.
“by a factor of four or five.”—T. B. H. Kuiper and G. M. Resch, “Deep Space Telecommunications,” from Perspectives on Radio Astronomy: Technologies for Large Antenna Arrays, proceedings of a conference held at the ASTRON Institute in Dwingeloo, Netherlands, April 12–14,1999. Available online at http://www.astron.nl/documents/conf/technology/techo8w.pdf. See also “Space Probes Could Talk Faster with Light,” UPI Science News, July 25, 2002, for the upgrade to Ka-band.
“a change of paradigm may be necessary.” —Alex Harwit, Martin Harwit, and Joss Bland-Hawthorn, “Laser Telemetry from Space,” Science 297, no. 5581 (July 26, 2002): 523.
“communications during peak periods.”—H. Hemmati, “Free-Space Optical Communications at JPL/NASA,” available online at http://lasers.jpinasa.gov/PAPERS/REVIEW/overview.pdf.
“Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.”—James Lesh, C. J. Ruggier, and R. J. Cesarone, “Space Communications Technologies for Interstellar Missions,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 49 (1996): 7–4.
“the communications system is not a problem.”—Lesh, telephone interview, December 19, 2002.
“volume aboard the spacecraft.”—Ben Iannotta, “That’s Entertainment,” New Scientist 169, issue 2283 (March 24, 2001): 32.
“a laser beacon sent from Earth.”—For more on the Optical Communications Demonstrator, see Multhu Jeganathan and Jim Lesh, “Laser Communications Unit Prepares for Test Flight,” Laser Focus World 35, no. 6 (June 1999), pp. 103–109.
“a distance of six million kilometers (3,725,000 miles).”—Mark Whalen, “GOPEX Reaches Galileo via Laser Beam,” JPL Universe, December 3o, 1992.
“Earth’s atmosphere upon the signal.”—K. Wilson, M. Jeganathan, and J. R. Lesh, “Results from Phase-1 and Phase-2 GOLD Experiments,” TDA Progress Report 42–128, February 151997.
“is caused by the Earth’s atmosphere.”—Bruno von Wayenburg, “Europe to Test Laser Link to Moon Probe,” New Scientist 178, issue 2395 (May 17, 2003).
“95 percent of the time.”—See the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s background information on laser communications, available online at lasers. jpl.nasa.gov.
“former director, Edward C. Stone.” —Edward C. Stone, “Communications Technologies for Space Exploration,” Proceedings of the IEEE vol. 87, no. 6 (June 1999). See also Stelzried Edwards et al., “NASA’s Deep Space Telecommunications Roadmap,” from JPL’s Telecommunications and Mission Operations Directorate, available online at http: //www.nasda.go. jp/pr/event/app/spaceops/paper98/tracks/1bo29.pdf.
“optical maser,” or laser.“—Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow, ”Infrared and Optical Masers,“ Physical Review no. 112 (December 1958): 1940-49.
“the search for extraterrestrial signals.”—Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, “Searching for Interstellar Communications,” Nature 184, no. 4690 (September 19,1959): 844-46.
“with R. N. Schwartz in Nature.”—R. N. Schwartz and C. H. Townes, “Interstellar and Interplanetary Communication by Optical Masers,” Nature, 190, no. 4772 (April 15,1961): 205–208.
“a common expensive resource for long-haul links”—Telephone interview with Adrian Hooke, February 27, 2003.
“not by radio but by gasoline.”— Ibid.
“a similar system called Galileo.” —A description of the European GPS system appears in “Europe’s Answer to GPS Irks Pentagon,” New Scientist 178, issue 2398 (June 7, 2003).
“the delicate navigation needed on the approach.”—NASA press release, “Stardust Status Report,” May 11, 2001.
“the motion of local stars and gas.”—John H. Mauldin reviews these numbers in his Prospects for Interstellar Travel, published by the American Astronautical Society (San Diego: Univelt, 1992), p. 167.
“from 52o to 603 light years”— Science Applications International Corporation, “Interstellar Spaceflight Primer,” NASA Contract No. NASW-5o67, February 2001, p. 71.
“pushing up close to light speed.”—Saul Moskowitz, “Trans-Stellar Space Navigation,” American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Journal 6 (1968): 1021–29; R. W. Stimets and E. Sheldon, “Celestial View from a Relativistic Starship,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 34 (1981): 83–99; E. Sheldon and R. H. Giles, “Celestial Views from Non-Relativistic and Relativistic Interstellar Spacecraft,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 36 (1983): 99–114.
“a sight no one may ever see.”—Mauldin, Prospects, 181.
“the spacecraft’s direction of travel.”—Ibid., 170.
“in the infrared and ultraviolet regions.”—Michael Dornheim, “Deep Space 1 Prepares to Launch Ion Drive,” Aviation Week fr Space Technology (October 5, 1998): 108.
“more important science data, including photos”—“NASA’s Deep Space One Succeeds in Close Asteroid Flyby,” from a NASA/JPL press release, July 29,1999.
“DSc’s mission data system in 1998.”—LaForge worked on Deep Space 1’s flight software as a NASA Faculty Fellow at JPL in 1997. His observations appear in a letter to MIT’s Technology Review, published as “Mis-Impressions about NASA,” which was posted to the Review’s Web site on March 7, 2003, and were later conveyed in a telephone interview with the author on July 22, 2003.
“we won’t know how well things work.” —Laurence LaForge in an e-mail to the author, July 22, 2003.
“as spacecraft learn how to set their own courses.”—ESA Press Release, “Set Your Own Course for the Stars,” November 12, 2002.
“based on the center of the galaxy rather than the galaxy as seen from Earth.”—These musings draw largely on astronomer Sten Odenwald’s speculations, found online at http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/q599.html.
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Gilster, P. (2004). Interstellar Communications and Navigation. In: Centauri Dreams. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3894-0_8
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