Collaborate Disseminate
When it comes to antenna projects, we usually cover little ones here. From copper traces on a circuit board to hand-made units for ham radio. But every once in a while it’s fun to look at the opposite end of the spectrum, and anyone who craves such change of pace …read more
Continue reading NASA Making Big Upgrades To Their Big Dish DSS43
Nary a month since NASA managed to reboot Voyager 2 after a technical malfunction, it looks like we’re about to lose contact for almost a whole year. The radio antenna that acts as Earth’s sole transmitter to Voyager 2 will soon undergo important upgra… Continue reading NASA is about to stop talking to Voyager 2 for almost a year
NASA engineers are conducting an extremely long-range reconfiguring of the space agency’s two 42-year-old Voyager deep-space probes to extend their service lives. By cutting back and reallocating heating resources and bringing back online thr… Continue reading NASA reallocates resources to extend life of Voyager deep-space probes
The popular press was recently abuzz with sad news from the planet Mars: Opportunity, the little rover that could, could do no more. It took an astonishing 15 years for it to give up the ghost, and it took a planet-wide dust storm that blotted out the sun and …read more
Continue reading Engineering for the Long Haul, the NASA Way
On the face of it, powering most spacecraft would appear to be a straightforward engineering problem. After all, with no clouds to obscure the sun, adorning a satellite with enough solar panels to supply its electrical needs seems like a no-brainer. Finding a way to support photovoltaic (PV) arrays of the proper size and making sure they’re properly oriented to maximize the amount of power harvested can be tricky, but having essentially unlimited energy streaming out from the sun greatly simplifies the overall problem.
Unfortunately, this really only holds for spacecraft operating relatively close to the sun. The tyranny of …read more
Continue reading The Deep Space Energy Crisis Could Soon Be Over
Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have eliminated a major bottleneck in the production of plutonium-238 for deep space exploration through automation. Continue reading Scientists Are Automating Plutonium Production So NASA Can Explore Deep Space
The probe crossed the heliopause, the boundary between the heliosphere and the interstellar medium, on November 5. Continue reading Voyager 2 Joins Its Twin in Interstellar Space
On the outside chance that we ever encounter a space probe from an alien civilization, the degree to which the world will change cannot be overestimated. Not only will it prove that we’re not alone, or more likely weren’t, depending on how long said probe has been traveling through space, but we’ll have a bonanza of super-cool new technology to analyze. Just think of the fancy alloys, the advanced biomimetic thingamajigs, the poly-godknowswhat composites. We’ll take a huge leap forward by mimicking the alien technology; the mind boggles.
Sadly, we won’t be returning the favor. If aliens ever snag one …read more
Continue reading Interstellar 8-Track: The Not-So-Low-Tech Data Recorders of Voyager
If the heady early days of space exploration taught us anything, it was how much we just didn’t know. Failure after failure mounted, often dramatic and expensive and sometimes deadly. Launch vehicles exploded, satellites failed to deploy, or some widget decided to give up the ghost at a crucial time, blinding a multi-million dollar probe and ending a mission long before any useful science was done. For the United States, with a deadline to meet for manned missions to the moon, every failure in the late 1950s and early 1960s was valuable, though, at least to the extent that it …read more
Continue reading Hacking When It Counts: The Pioneer Missions
Humanity has been a spacefaring species for barely sixty years now. In that brief time, we’ve fairly mastered the business of putting objects into orbit around the Earth, and done so with such gusto that a cloud of both useful and useless objects now surrounds us. Communicating with satellites in Earth orbit is almost trivial; your phone is probably listening to at least half a dozen geosynchronous GPS birds right now, and any ham radio operator can chat with the astronauts aboard the ISS with nothing more that a $30 handy-talkie and a homemade antenna.
But once our spacecraft get …read more
