Astrophiz Podcasts

Astrophiz128: Richard Stephenson ~ Talking with Spacecraft Pt2 This is an amazing interview where we hear first hand how distant spacecraft are controlled from Earth. Richard Stephenson is the Operations Supervisor at the CDSCC, The Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex at Tidbinbilla, jointly run by NASA and Australia’s CSIRO. Richard explains how he can lock onto and send commands to Voyager2 about 20Billion kilometres away, using the newly refurbished transmitter on the 70m DSS-43 dish, and can then capture the telemetry data that V2 sends back to earth, by controlling an array of 4 Tidbinbilla dishes. Then Richard gives us the inside story about sending commands out to the New Horizons Pluto Mission about 7billion kilometres away. Also in this stunning episode: VPN command systems. How spacecraft have virtual channels and labelled telemetry so science data can be automatically sent to project primary investigators. How data from all the missions converging on Mars can be acquired and packaged t