[X] My Assistant

[djellison]

Random thought. I was just sent an interesting movie, which was a composite of various space stills, with some plasma/wave sounds in the background and a generic 'beep beep' spacecraft noise on top.

But what do spacecraft actually sound like when transmitting - has anyone heard the 'feed' from a DSN dish be deconstructed into an audible wav? Is it like a dial up modem or something else. Do spacecraft at 288kbps sound different to those at 120bps etc? I'm not talking about the spooky interpretations of mag/fields/waves/particles etc that we are treated to - but the actual downlink itself. The only example I can think of is the MEX cannister mode listening to PHX during EDL - but that actually ended up like a plasma/wave observation because of the massive doppler involved!

I remember the BBC 'The Planets' series ( very good, spectacular visuals, but now very out-dated ) - and every time a spacecraft flew past the camera, it made a beautifully doppler shifted 'beep beep beep' sound.

Doug

[djellison]

Yeah - we had a small dish at school, and it's box of tricks fed into the - I think it was from one of the older Meteosats ( which they quite cunning use for both taking the observation which gets downlinked to the ground station AND for then relaying the processed results back to users via their dishes ) - images took a while to come down- but it was great to watch.