Sounds like a dream job
First in line for seeing what other planets/moons/comets are like, seeing Saturn's rings or Io's volcanoes up close before anyone else, and all that in a beautiful country environment. What's not to like ?
When Richard Stephenson drives to work, there's a chance that later that day he'll become the first human to see new details of Mars, a moon of Saturn, or the far reaches of the solar system. Again. Stephenson's seen plenty of such firsts because his job as an Operations Supervisor at the Canberra Deep Space Tracking Complex …
This may come across a bit rude, which is frankly my intention. You're a bit of a knob.
It's rare to find someone who's still enthusiastic about their job, and while you might hate yours (after all, you're on El Reg even as the working day begins), but that's no excuse for the ignorant cynicism you're demonstrating.
First in line, along with the other dozen nerds crowded around the screen. Sounds like he's bigging up his job to explain it to his kids what he does all day.
I'm afraid you merely show your ignorance. Do you have any idea just how weak a -168dB signal actually is? Incredible that they can still pick it up.
A typical DBS system in the US has incoming signals at -90 dbm, and they can be received with an 18" dish and LNA that costs less than a buck. ATSC antennas can receive signals even weaker than that if you add a good low noise preamp. Your ears are just not engineered as well I guess :)
But -168 dbm, damn that's impressive!
Opps, a little slip in there -- antennas -- but you corrected yourself afterwards with the correct form: antennae. At least you didn't commit that heinous crime of saying indexes when you meant indicies (or use matrixes for matrices).
Nice to see people still really know how to spell.
BTW, excellent article on the unsung heroes (from the Greek) that make everything else work.
(I'll get my coat.)
Re-calibrated the elReg translator to American English - indicated a reference to software bug appendages
Sources say that both of these forms - antennas/antennae - are used in Australia
Spanish translator comes in with antenas
Honored to up-vote both John Cleese and Socrates in the same post!
Many jobs have their rewarding moments, e.g. -
- When a teacher sees the penny drop in one of their pupils.
- When a salesman sees the customer sign on the dotted line.
- When a manager sees the work completed on time and budget, and signed off.
- When a politician wins an election.
I think of James Clerk Maxwell, who predicted electromagnetic waves. He also calculated their speed, based on measured constants in the lab, and it was as near as dammit the speed of light. That was the first clue to what light really is.
But the Voyager man has every right to be happy in his job.
> Shirley, there's got to be a nerdette out there who digs this stuff?
There are, but they are a rare minority in my experience. The nerd/nerdette ratio is far skewed towards the male gender from my experience, unfortunately.
If the current push of getting more women interested in STEM results in more nerdettes in 15-20 years time, that would be great for the next generation of nerds, if a bit late for me though :-(
>So women should be encouraged into STEM so they can be nerdettes to lonely heterosexual nerds in a few years time? What an enticement!
Well - one of the reasons girls haven't (traditionally) gone in for STEM is the fear that boys won't like them, if they appear too clever.
"Well - one of the reasons girls haven't (traditionally) gone in for STEM is the fear that boys won't like them, if they appear too clever."
Citation needed. Seriously; I've heard this (as hearsay) a bunch of times, but have honestly never ever met a guy who finds clever girls a problem (in fact quite the opposite) - and I've never heard a girl actually say she experiences it as a problem. And I work in IT.
"Even Voyager 1 can beat that, regulalry hitting 160 bits per second and reaching 1,200 bits per second when emptying its memory."
Around that time (40 years ago) I remember the step up from 110 bps on a teleprinter to 300 bps on a termprinter was like amazing. And doing on an acoustic modem was absolute magic. I remember the thrill of communicating as far as a BBS in Hull ...
Whereas these guys and guyesses were building something that can do that from beyond the solar system to a receiver only 20 minutes from where everybody and a dog is leaking emr across the spectrum.
More than a pint is deserved!
Nothing wrong with the units, although there technically should be a suffix to tell you what is being measured as the decibel scale can be applied to many things.
Essentially what it is saying is we need a big-ass antenna to detect this very weak signal though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel
I think -168dbm is about the same as a "gnat fart", though -168db would be roughly 1/10^17 [I said 'roughly'] as 'db' is a ratio, but 'dbm' is the log10 of a signal's strength (in milliiwats).
So I guess if someone can quantify "gnat fart" in milliwatts, then we'll be able to translate -168dbm into "gnat farts".
I think a gnat's ass is around 0.1 mm [that is mostly a guess, gnats are hard to measure with calipers].
also, when the noise floor level is hundreds or thousands of times the signal strength, which is actually somewhat common with cell phones, you need some tricky techniques to demodulate it accurately (edit: at the tower, not the phone itself). but yeah, we do that kind of thing pretty well, now.
one thing worth mentioning - how come nobody said "V'ger" yet?
Which according to Wikipedia was released in February 2000.
A few years ago, I was talking to an RAF engineer, who told me that they still used Windows 95 as it was the last version of Windows capable of running the originally-written-in-the-70s code, used for diagnosing and configuring the Tornado's on board systems.
Is it the same thing here? Are they relying on a 17 year old OS as the only thing that can still run the 40 year old code written to communicate with Voyager?
Is it the same thing here? Are they relying on a 17 year old OS as the only thing that can still run the 40 year old code written to communicate with Voyager?
Yes, that comes from that almost forgotten era when software was production ready when it was released. That was partially because it was supplied on CDs and they'd otherwise have a massive amount of coasters, which would have gotten them sued by AOL for stealing their business model.
Sorry, drifted slightly aside there :).
Overnight shipping, world-wide, has certainly been an option for as long as software on CD has been an option. I don't buy your story.
Depends on which overnight you choose. In the colder parts of the world that can buy you *months* :)
Slight side track, but if you'd like to know what the Deep Space Network is doing right now go have a look at NASA's DSN Now page.
It shows all the different dishes around the world, and which spacecraft each one is communicating with.
It's also visible on the wonderful Space Dashboard, which has all kinds of interesting up-to-date space nerdery :)
This may have been a movie or book I read but I seem to remember that recently, a group of hobbyists got together to piece together the software to communicate with an old probe that had recently become active again.
Military has no excuse, they have the funding, they should remake the software. Space sector has 2p to its name, so it's fair to say they might not have the resources for a massive new emulator dealie that will, itself, become redundant as soon as the probes using these old protocols die or drift away. (/cry)
Yes, Captain Dense, that was my point.
No more Space Roombas. People in the High Frontier. What's the point of just looking through a camera? Might as well play video games. Let's get working on people feeling the crunch of the granulated bleach of Mars's "soil" under thier boots and forgetting about arguing over whether to call Pluto a planet or not in favor of actually going for a look at it.
It's there. Yes it's hard to do. No, Bill Maher, self-proclaimed fiscal expert, doesn't have the last word on whether it is worthwhile or not any more than any other TV pundit does, and he is willfully misreading the impetus behind the push in order to fuel a "bit".
Besides, it isn't an either/or situation; we can have social programs on Earth *and* Space for Humans. We just have to decide we are going to get serious about national/international bookkeeping instead of pandering to corporations.
There are solid cultural reasons for going out there that are important no matter the politics of your particular culture at this point in time.
Too late for me. I'm from the generation that decided to do more with less (aka doing less).
I kinda suspect that our German friend Bode (who proposed the name "Uranus") was fully aware of its English pronunciation and associated alternative meaning, and intended it as a "take that" against Herschel for calling it "Georgium Sidus" while in brown-nose mode.
It's brilliant what the Voyager people have done. I was reading about retirement of someone in their 80s that worked on it since the start.
"That it remains humanity’s only close encounter with the planet is a testament to the durability of the Voyagers and the outstanding and astounding achievements the missions represent."
Also how little we spend on space exploration compared to weapons, or even pretty rubbish game/film/TV remakes/sequels.
I worked a JPL on the DSN in the 90s, around the time of the Voyager 2 encounter at Neptune.
Science data (the pics, among other things.) comes down, goes to the project first, then to the Image Processing Lab, both in Pasadena, and then onward from there. Operators running the ground systems didn't/don't even have access to the science data AFAIK.
No doubt the image processing was automated and the images could have emerged from the IPL within a few moments of download, but I'd wager plenty of people had a chance to see them first before being sent back out for general consumption.
And we all saw images coming in "In Real Time" on the TV monitors in the cafeteria and elsewhere around the Lab. And if you want to quibble about people possibly sleeping in some parts of the world when the data was coming in through Canberra, the same can be said for when it was coming in from Madrid and Barstow.
Thing is, NASA and JPL spacecraft don't downlink images that you can doubleclick and view. There's a whole toolchain needed to process the data into a format suitable for human viewing. As a simple forinstance, many of the imaging devices are "pushbroom" -- that is., a single line of pixels is scanned, followed by the next line, the next line and so on. This comes down in a variety of exotic formats. There's far, far more than you'd ever want to know over on http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com
See for instance this thread: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=8198
(Far more with all the scripting and C wizardry you can shake a stick on UMSF. Well worth registering if you're interested but READ THE FAQ FIRST.
All the data's public domain; NASA / JPL make it avaiilable via the PDS if you'd like to have a go. You can still get images from Mars and have them in a postable state quicker than the actual project team if you're good, and lucky, and diligent :)
PDS: http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/search/
Anyway, I'm not quite calling BS on this guy, but I'd be interested to hear what toolchains he uses / used in 1989.