Quote from: Ben the Space Brit on 08/10/2017 10:22 amThat still begs the question of whether NASA and the international community want to increase the southern polar DSN capacity.Semi OT but is there operational advantages to having large arrays of smaller dishes (the VLA strategy) compared to having one big dish (the Arieebo strategy)?Yes. With an array, you can use the antennas separately for "nearby" probes (e.g. Mars, allowing you to communicate with several probes simultaneously), and use them in an array only when you need to.
That still begs the question of whether NASA and the international community want to increase the southern polar DSN capacity.Semi OT but is there operational advantages to having large arrays of smaller dishes (the VLA strategy) compared to having one big dish (the Arieebo strategy)?
1.6.5 Multiple Spacecraft Per Antenna (DSN)Where a multiplicity of spacecraft lie within the beamwidth of a single DSN antenna, it may be possible to capture data from two or more spacecraft simultaneously using the Multiple Spacecraft Per Aperture (MSPA) system. MSPA decreases DSN loading and will save the project’s money (see Section 2.1.3).
Hunt himself was such a regular on Patrick Moore’s The Sky at Night television show, that he became the public face of the mission to a whole generation of UK armchair astronomers.And it is not just the public perception of space that was changed by the Voyager images. “In those days planetary exploration was something that Nasa did and the UK didn’t really get involved in. But the fact that Garry was involved meant that other people could get involved. This has blossomed now if we think of missions like Rosetta and Cassini and the forthcoming Juice mission, all with massive UK involvement. It made us think that the UK does planets, Europe does planets – it’s not just Nasa,” says Murray.Indeed, the United Kingdom Space Agency’s website lists 14 planetary exploration missions that the UK is working on. Most of these are through its membership of the European Space Agency. And it all started with the Voyagers.“I think about Voyager all the time because they were the pathfinders essentially. They taught us how to send multi-instrument spacecraft to the outer solar system,” says Murray.
After 37 years, Voyager 1 has fired up its trajectory thrustersThis week, the scientists and engineers on the Voyager team did something very special.ERIC BERGER - 12/1/2017, 8:45 PM
On Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2017, Voyager engineers fired up the four TCM thrusters for the first time in 37 years and tested their ability to orient the spacecraft using 10-millisecond pulses. The team waited eagerly as the test results traveled through space, taking 19 hours and 35 minutes to reach an antenna in Goldstone, California, that is part of NASA's Deep Space Network.
BTW, Voyager 2 is expected to break into Interstellar Space late 2019 or early 2020; ... [snip] ... What are the chances that the one on Voyager 2 stops working by then?