Voyager High-Gain Antenna (HGA) schematic. While the scale may differ - the DSN sports telescopes up to 70 meters across - the Voyager twins were each launched with the largest dish that could fit into the fairing of the Titan IIIE launch vehicle. The most prominent physical feature of both the ground stations of the Deep Space Network (DSN), which we’ve covered in-depth already, and the Voyager spacecraft themselves are their parabolic dish antennas. The surface precision of the finished dish is 250 μm. The body of the dish is made from honeycomb aluminum and is covered with graphite-impregnated epoxy laminate skins. Voyager primary reflector being manufactured, circa 1975. And so the hardware, both in the spacecraft and on the ground, reflects that hope. The Voyager spacecraft were designed to meet these core mission goals, but planners also hoped that the vehicles would survive past their final planetary encounters and provide valuable data as they crossed the void. Like all NASA programs, Voyager had certain primary mission goals, a minimum set of planetary science experiments that project managers were reasonably sure they could accomplish. The idea of visiting all the outer planets was too enticing to pass up, and with the success of the Pioneer missions to Jupiter serving as dress rehearsals, the Voyager program was designed. If launched at just the right time, a probe would be able to reach Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune using only gravitational assists after its initial powered boost, before being flung out on a course that would eventually take it out into interstellar space. The complex mission profile had its origins in the “Planetary Grand Tour” concept of the mid-1960s, which was planned to take advantage of an alignment of the outer planets that would occur in the late 1970s.
But how is that even possible? What 1970s-era radio technology made it onto the twin space probes that allowed it to not only fulfill their primary mission of exploring the outer planets, but also let them go into an extended mission to interstellar space, and still remain in two-way contact? As it turns out, there’s nothing magical about Voyager’s radio - just solid engineering seasoned with a healthy dash of redundancy, and a fair bit of good luck over the years.įor a program that in many ways defined the post-Apollo age of planetary exploration, Voyager was conceived surprisingly early. Like many NASA programs, Voyager has far exceeded its original design goals, and is still reporting back useful science data to this day. While the usual suspects jumped to the usual conclusions - aliens!! - in the absence of a firm explanation for the anomaly, some of us looked at this event as an opportunity to marvel at the fact that the two Voyager spacecraft, now in excess of 40 years old, are still in constant contact with those of us back on Earth, and this despite having covered around 20 billion kilometers in one of the most hostile environments imaginable. The tech news channels were recently abuzz with stories about strange signals coming back from Voyager 1.
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