[X] My Assistant

[Decepticon]

I hope this gets approved!

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/05071...yby_future.html

[tty]

I remember that Carl Sagan once suggested in a book that some private foundation should "pick up" residual NASA missions as they were "turned off", and that this would be an extremely cost-effective way to conduct research. Perhaps an idea to explore. One problem is of course that access to the DSN will usually be required.

tty

[dvandorn]

Yeah -- and NASA controls the DSN. So, if you have a good idea to use left-over planetary probes, all well and good -- but if you need to use the DSN to communicate with them, you're SOL if NASA doesn't want to give you DSN privileges.

I think we need to figure out alternatives to the DSN before we can talk about private extensions of planetary probe missions. And since there *are* no alternatives to the DSN for communicating with planetary probes, that doesn't leave much in the way of alternatives...

-the other Doug

[abalone]

Yeah -- and NASA controls the DSN.  So, if you have a good idea to use left-over planetary probes, all well and good -- but if you need to use the DSN to communicate with them, you're SOL if NASA doesn't want to give you DSN privileges.-the other Doug

There are quite a few radio telescopes that are not part of the DSN, example the radio telescope in Parkes, Australia. It does work for DSN like Apollo 11, attempts to re-establish contact with Pathfinder when it died and the Mars Polar Lander when it dissappeared, some of the Huygens downlink, but most of the time it does research. There are others around the world as well, it would just take some coordination to put together a useful syndicate. It would depend entirely if they could be convinced to give up a few hours of telescope time to do this work. There is no reason why NASA has a monopoly through its DSN on communication with probes.

[Bob Shaw]

Could a network of semi-amateur/student/small organisation stations be set up using apeture synthesis/phased array techniques and aggressive, SETI@Home-like signal processing to pick up data? We're talking about, in many cases, a very low bitrate for 99% of the time. Amateurs certainly picked up Apollo transmissions in the 1960s, and presumably could have listened to the ALSEPs until they fell silent.

[abalone]

Could a network of semi-amateur/student/small organisation stations be set up using apeture synthesis/phased array techniques and aggressive, SETI@Home-like signal processing to pick up data?

It is not enough to just pick up data, you have to be able to transmit commands as well. Parkes has two dishes the larger being about 64m, the same as the larger dishes in the DSN.
If you have not seen the movie, there is one called "The Dish" starring Sam Neil that give quite a good account of its contributuion to the first Moon landing.

[Bob Shaw]

It is not enough to just pick up data, you have to be able to transmit commands as well. Parkes has two dishes the larger being about 64m, the same as the larger dishes in the DSN.
If you have not seen the movie, there is one called "The Dish" starring Sam Neil that give quite a good account of its contributuion to the first Moon landing.

For some high percentage of the time, listening is probably acceptable - especially with semi-dormant spacecraft, and I still wonder whether big dishes are required for that. Obviously, you *do* need a big dish to wake 'em up and tell them to perform, because they only have little titchy antennae on 'em and they just wouldn't hear you otherwise.

I wonder what the post-encounter cruise bitrate(s) for New Horizons is(are), and what the long-term strategy for the vehicle is (if you're not running cameras or other warm things, and are prepared to accept a c-o-l-d vehicle) assuming there's cash to fund it? We have a decade plus of computational advancement to prepare for the Pluto encounter, assuming that a distributed reception network is feasible, and potentially decades more of operation thereafter (I hope!).