50 Years Later, This Canberra Apollo-Era Antenna Still Talks to Voyager 2

[gary]

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has honored Deep Space
Station 43 (DSS-43) as an IEEE Milestone in March 2024 during a ceremony
held at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex in Australia.

Today more than 40 percent of all data retrieved by celestial explorers,
including Voyagers, New Horizons, and the Mars Curiosity rover, comes
through DSS-43.

In fact it is the only antenna remaining on Earth capable of communicating
with Voyager 2.

Story here :-
https://spectrum.ieee.org/apollo-era-antenna-voyager-2

[Startrek (Martin)]

Gary,
It’s quite remarkable actually that this country has been an important player in US Space Exploration since the early 1960’s but we only have an internal annual budget for our Space Agency of around $40million per annum ( correct me if I’m wrong )
A joke really !!

Who’s going to inspire and lead our country to invest in future Space technologies and infrastructure for our younger generations.

What ever happened to the Cape York Space Port ??

Thanks for posting

Martin

[Hans Tucker (Hans)]

An interesting read. So, the success of DSS-43 is in part due to the Engineering but mostly due to location.

[Crater101 (Warren)]

I echo the sentiments here. Very interesting reading, my thanks.

[tim.anderson (Tim Anderson)]

This is a small story about the tracking of the Voyager spacecraft.

When Voyager was about to pass through the edge of the solar system, NASA had a problem - the spacecraft was so far south (using the Earth coordinates) that there were no radio telescope observatories in the northern hemisphere that could see the signals from the spacecraft. So NASA rang up CSIRO and asked 'Can we rent the Dish at Parkes to observe the transition?"

CSIRO said "Of course you can, at a reasonable price". I have no idea what NASA paid to CSIRO for renting the Dish for two months, but I suspect it had a lot of zeroes at the end of the number.

I do remember that John Sarkissian, who managed the data collection for the engagement, said that the strength of the Voyager signal was one billlionth of one billionth of a single Watt. But the Parkes observatory was sufficiently sensitive to do the job, and collected the telemetry as the spacecraft surfed through the edge of our solar system.

Parkes is still an amazing radio telescope.