How To Contact The Voyager 2 Probe (PART 1)

[@kyis1256]

The thing is 40 years old... 40 years in cold cold space... Still amazes me ^^

[@user-lp2op9uu1w]

Nothing keeps the cold away as a lump of plutonium!

[@kyis1256]

Most likely due to the fact that greedy assholes are manufacturing a lot of unsafe and badly designed products in china. Almost everything that blows up in your face or breaks out of the box has made in china written on it. That said some of the highest quality products are made in china as well, but the tsunami of garbage being exported does leave a sticky trail in the minds of people, not letting the good stuff shine. The sad part is that there is high demand for the cheap garbage mostly out of ignorance of their inner workings or the condition in which they were made.

[@user-po6hn9id1t]

kyis if you want quality you must pay more

[@alex_inside]

@@kyis1256 the problem is that the Assholes in the US want to keep the profit margins high so they make them as cheap as possible.

[@richardcanberra]

Thanks Dave, that's what I call a rapid turnaround! In my defence for sounding like a squirrel on caffeine (If anyone has seen the movie Hoodwinked you'll know what I mean) I had just come of a 12 hour night shift and running on Dave induced adrenaline

[@mpsmith35]

Richard Stephenson Thanks for staying behind to describe how it all works. As an ex electronics engineer, it was very interesting.

[@sparkplug1018]

That was a very in depth but understandable explanation of how we communicate with the Voyager spacecraft, really enjoyed it. I wonder though, when the end is near if it would be possible to warm up the camera and take one last picture and transmit it back to Earth, sort of Voyagers parting gift to us. The first picture of our star taken from interstellar space. Would be fascinating to know what it looks like from out there.

[@har234908234]

+sparkplug1018 I like your thinking, but I'm not sure what could be gained beyond the "Family Portrait" frames... just another star! Seems incredible now that Carl Sagan had to lobby for those pictures. As to whether they could, there's a not very technical faq - voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/faq.html

[@sparkplug1018]

Id imagine from Voyagers current location the Sun would look like a full Moon, maybe a bit brighter. But all the same would be interesting to see our star from interstellar space for the first time. Oddly hadn't considered that the cameras may have been damaged by their time in deep space, makes sense though. Seems a odd though that a copy of the software isn't available anymore, in some archive. If only for posterity.

[@mpsmith35]

The Sun would just look like a bright star - a point of light. So a photo would not look very interesting.

[@Mythricia1988]

This guy is actually fantastic to listen to. What a great speaker! I must admit a lot of the radio stuff was way beyond my comprehension, but still, really incredibly interesting.

[@harindugamlath]

Yes! He knows his stuff. Really well. A great guy.

[@harbselectronicslab3551]

Funnily enough most of the NASA and CSIRO guys are very approachable and more than willing to talk to you about anything you like.........wether you understand them, well thats another story......they are so dedicated to their jobs and the people around them, it just becomes "Normal Speak"

[@paulsengupta971]

Everything he says is truly fascinating. Certainly knows his stuff and isn't boring with it either. The radio stuff was on my wavelength! ;-)

[@GoSlash27]

@dennis pickard Yes, all engineering and technology. Without all of this engineering and technology, you don't get any science because you can't talk to your probes. This is the nuts 'n bolts that makes it all possible, and is darned interesting IMO.

[@gregorymccoy6797]

Amazing. I could listen to him all day. Supremely knowledgeable.

[@SouthwesternEagle]

"THIS IS 20 BYTES!" 20 BYTES IS 160 BITS Both of those statements are 160 bits in length. It takes 1 second for Voyager 1 and 2 to send each line that you see above this sentence. Getting 20 characters per second from interstellar space from a 1977 probe is actually quite a good speed.

[@klam77]

WOW: Voyager Communications via DSN 30 MILLI DEGREES AIM required! +/- 1Hz frequency lock! - 158dBm signal received! (Kepler = -165dBm; Maven = -170dBm)! SNR =~ 6.5-7.0 dB even slight rain fades the 34m dish! 19K "Noise temperature" from cone to receiver! Multi-convolutional encoding (same as ADSL modems)! Once a week: BLF (Best Lock Frequency) Characterization Exercise: send ping messages on varying ramp of frequencies and 30hrs later receive fastest ping back...tells you the best channel to use for that week!

[@dudeskidaddy]

Great interview and What I love about this Dave is you let him talk. Thanks for doing this channel!

[@rostlaur]

By far the very best ever on the subject. I could have camped for days in front of the screen listening to all of you (parts 1,2, 3 and the "Behind The Scenes" 1 & 2). Mr. Richard Stephenson is a genius, a master at sharing complex information and his infinite passion for Space and RF sciences. In my book his team is amongst the greatest explorers/discoverers of all time. It is mind blowing the talent and the ways the geniuses of this team make it possible to still communicate with all the probes in Space.

[@HomoSapiensMember]

Dave, sir, this is fantastic stuff!

[@EEVdiscover]

Thank Richard!

[@k7iq]

I totally agree ! I could listen to this guy all day ! BTW, there are amateur DSN (google that) techies out there that listen to probes. Not Voyager of course, but still cool. Hey Dave.... Maybe they'd let you go in and do a tear-down ! :)

[@musashi939]

boB Gudgel let's take it apaaat.

[@paulsengupta971]

Yep, thanks for making these Dave, this is proper engineering stuff!

[@mikewalters5326]

few. . '

[@jonahansen]

Wow! This is amazing - and this guy knows what he's talking about. Only video I've ever seen with this level of detail on the underlying technology. Thank you so much.

[@davidmaiolo]

Dave send our thanks to Richard for participating in this awesome video!

[@mixolydian2010]

Mind blowing, its incredible we can still receive from it. I loved the way the guy didn't pull any punches and left it up to us to work it out. As a shortwave enthusiast i get the noise problems and they can be bad enough over a few hundred miles, marvellous technology and hats off to this guy and the others who work there, your doing an amazing job. Cheers Dave for putting this together.

[@paulsengupta971]

Working in WCDMA, I get the thing about extracting signals below the noise using a mask. 73 de G1YJY

[@michaeloosthuizen2383]

Didn't realise there was so much engineering involved with the antenna and dish... kinda want to climb on it and poke my nose into the mechanics now!

[@EEVdiscover]

Join the queue!

[@paulsengupta971]

I've made a visit to the Chilbolton radio telescope here in the UK and poked my nose into the mechanics of the thing. Not quite like this though!

[@harindugamlath]

Wow! This is some seriously cool content. Thank you very much Dave. Please continue the quality work!

[@Cracktune]

DAVE! I just landed a job at a satellite manufacturer today, this is wicked interesting!!

[@harbselectronicslab3551]

I was once Playing Cricket as you do on the 210 foot Parkes Radio Telescope dish, before the mesh got upgraded and it still had the old Aerial cabin and decided I would get off and get a drink, so rather than get the dish driver to tilt it down and upset the game, I would go down centre man hole........ Trouble is I managed to get firmly stuck half in the hole and half out........it took me a fair bit of effort to get free I might add......I thought I might become part of the instrument there for a while lol....... Been a while since I rode the clunky old elevator up to the receiver cabin now, but I bet its a lot more roomy with that new one ! Thanks for the video Dave.....you tend to take for granted how big and respected team the CSIRO in Oz are..........I love those places !!

[@terry241]

Hey Dave, I really love watching this new series of videos on your new channel... I just hope you have enough time in the day to keep it all up... Best of luck... Thanks Terry

[@mrgeeknesss]

Dave i allready liked watching your other channels but this stuff is awesome. hope to see more of this kinda tech in the future.

[@BenBilesBB-box]

I threw away my TV years ago. This video confirms I won't need one in the future. Thanks Dave , just fascinating. -263c to reduce the noise in the LNA :)

[@guyh3403]

Both the Voyagers always taunted my imagination. Thank you for this extremely satisfying insight!!

[@AnthonyShuker]

Hendrik Hendrikson you're welcome

[@666Bern666]

Thank you Dave & Richard for this. Myself and a mate made a trip from the UK to go to our nearest DSN which is Madrid and were a little disappointed to find almost no technical info about the workings of the station, even the eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html screen in the visitors centre was down and we had to use our phones to check the site for what was actually being tracked at the time. Had a quick look round the visitors centre then took about a hundred pics of the dishes! :-) DSS63 is right next to the road and main gate which was about the only saving grace. So fantastic to get some proper technical info. Cheers again guys!

[@D4narchy]

Sometimes you find some gems on youtube, and this is one of them.

[@dyode1]

...retrofitted vacuum cleaner in reverse blowing water droplets off the positive pressure nitrogen volume radio transparent envelope above the cones omfg I'm in HEAVEN! ...keep it up Dave, this is gold. Looking forward to the synchrotron in Melbourne and the DoD might even let you do one on JORN? I guess the key is having someone like Richard, especially a little wired after a 12hr shift to be loose and passionate and so knowledgeable on the minutiae of the tech and also the history... well done, let 'em ramble Dave......thanks for this, I hope it's a successful experiment.

[@Sgt_Bill_T_Co]

As a radio physicist it was nice to hear all about the SNR, and as for -158dBmw - fantastic!

[@HarmanRobotics]

Excellent, could listen to him talk all day!

[@CarstenGroen]

Super video, and a SUPER speaker !!

[@jody5661]

Glad to see that the channel is back up. Subscribed.

[@andreymarinov4410]

Compliments from a particle physicist from CERN and a ham radio operator. Very nice video I am eager to share it with other colleagues.

[@deathcow]

That was excellent. Richard obviously knows his stuff, its inspiring.

[@OC35]

As I used to send commands to satellites in the 60s from a NASA Stadan station I find this very interesting, with plenty of technical information.

[@Oldman-ml2qv]

learnt a lot really interesting. hope to see more engineering and space related content on the new channel

[@Atomic_Haggis]

Oh yes. This is brilliant. Thanks for making this new channel... a true voyage(r) of discovery! This chap was really kind to share the time and explanations.

[@Eo_Tunun]

Yo Dave, putting the expedition stuff into a channel of its own was the perfect idea! And, crikey, did you pick an interesting topic here! F***ing ace! Love it!

[@Gmtail]

The fact that the Voyager craft is still working is amazing, even more so that we can send commands to it. I am assuming the thing was mostly made with Basic Logic ICs, however I could be wrong.

[@HomoSapiensMember]

god i love this new channel concept!

[@rondlh20]

Yay, the channel is back...

[@BillyLapTop]

Wow Dave! This was a superior video. Radio Astronomy has always been one of my interests and it was great to see the hardware and what the limits of sensitivity are. Thank you very much to you and Richard Stephenson for a really informative look at the DSN.

[@blushellneon7958]

I've worked with ka and ku band multiplexors for US DoD applications on the MUOS program, all this RF gets me excited!

[@MrBanzoid]

Great new channel Dave. Can't wait for the next vid.

[@AnthonyShuker]

MrBanzoid thanks

[@mike61456]

thank you for making this video it's a subject that I've wanted to know more about for a really long time

[@tullyfisher]

This is super interesting. Thanks so much for this upload!

[@petehiggins33]

Great video, thanks Dave. Minor point, the latest accepted view is that Beagle 2 landed successfully on the surface of Mars but the solar panels failed to open fully which masked the antenna and prevented communications.

[@peckelhaze6934]

Absolutely fascinating. Thanks for that. Now for part 2.

[@JKERRI1]

Thanks Dave for this hugely interesting video 👍

[@SCIFIaction]

This is incredible! I was lucky enough to see Greenbank as a young child. Really cool stuff :)

[@colinpamplin9976]

Great video and so so interesting. As a I said in my comment on the trailer I remember the launch of these two craft in 1977. Looking forward to watching part 2

[@RB747domme]

Richard, fantastic video. There's just one thing I don't understand. Everything you just said. The dish antenna looked nice though.

[@hexinli]

The mechanicals are almost as interesting as the electronics!!! Nice!

[@SaturnV2000]

Fascinating discussion! . . . I always wished for detail on how we communicate with Voyager! Us radio guys (amateur/ham) really appreciate the precision built into the system.

[@stephengloor8451]

Excellent video - more of these please

[@ThomasHart59]

Great video Dave, keep up the good work!

[@AnthonyShuker]

Thomas Hart thanks

[@tohopes]

16:48 forklift

[@parkerproffitt3012]

Yes

[@TheDrunkenMug]

Great video Dave and Richard ! I love it, good stuff ! :D

[@aidanscapeing]

Great idea, it woulds be a great channel for site visits.

[@analogelectronics2253]

This is a fantastic content from you Dave, very valuable information !

[@materialsguy2002]

For the type of bandwidth and frequency accuracy they need, what kind of local oscillators are they using? Is GPSDO good enough? I am thinking not. Dave, investigate the metrology.

[@richardcanberra]

Each Complex has a pair of atomic clocks. We have 2 Hydrogen Masers that provide timing (1pps) but just as importantly generate 5, 10 and 100Mhz frequency references

[@antoineroquentin2297]

Awesome, I like it. Dave is a bit low on audio though. More RF stuff please :)

[@EEVdiscover]

That was deliberate this time. A new style of interview where I will mostly put up question on the screen in edit rather than me talking.

[@MilesBader]

I like this style... You can still hear Dave, but the volume difference really puts the focus on the person being interviewed.

[@praemdonck]

Great video, very interesting. Thanks Dave

[@rfengr00]

Wow! 400 kW at S band. I assume that's raw power into the feed; must be a big klystron.

[@NivagSwerdna]

Good luck with the more general channel, you will get billions of subscribers!

[@zapfanzapfan]

Fantastically interesting, thank you!

[@BenHelweg]

Thanks Dave, these are amazing.

[@WouterWeggelaar]

Excellent stuff! makes me proud to be in this line of business (space communications)!

[@materialsguy2002]

I'm in, Dave. This kind of thing is ENGINEERING.

[@sriaparajith]

Wow. Dave, this is heavy!

[@EEVdiscover]

There's that word again, heavy...

[@kevinhardisty6465]

This is fantastic Dave! Thanks!

[@AnthonyShuker]

Kevin Hardisty you're welcome

[@dr3754]

the distance of v'ger is like going to pluto and back and then going back to pluto again roughly. wow!

[@Steve211Ucdhihifvshi]

Awesome vid, Ive been to parkes and tid. and i just wished the whole time to get closer or some more insight! This hit the spot! Thank you

[@FelixIsMyName]

WoW this video was totally amazing!

[@inseries5494]

this is wow wow wowwww

[@neatodd]

Fascinating video. One question - at 17:30 the discussion about the Voyager 2 RTG. Richard says the transducers are failing - I wonder if he meant to say 'thermocouples'?

[@richardcanberra]

neatodd Yes i did mean thermocouples. There were a few spot the obvious mistakes. When talking about rain attenuation I said beamwidth instead of wavelength being a factor. The sad thing was I remembered saying them the day after and have been cringing ever since. The beauty of unscripted video😉

[@neatodd]

Hey, thanks for replying. Don't worry about the odd slip, the details you gave of the communication with Voyager were absolutely fascinating, I envy you for having such an interesting job! Hopefully there will be more videos in the future. Fingers crossed for V2's survival (and communication) into interstellar space.

[@craign8ca]

Really find this stuff interesting. There's a great movie out called "The Big Dish." Its about communicating with the Apollo missions (don't want to give any of it away).

[@sysmatt]

The capacitor failure situation is covered in Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space" an excerpt is available on google books .. also i recall there being a IEEE journal article about the incident but my membership ended years ago.

[@gwyllymsuter4551]

It's a fun place to work but bloody cold in winter. miss it heaps

[@deadfreightwest5956]

I was 11 when the Voyagers were launched. They had a mission, they accomplished it. Decades later all has been pure bonus. Imagine what we would have achieved if we had spent money on similar projects instead of Wholly Babble studies (aka WAR).

[@rostlaur]

Today August 20th, 40th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 2 HAPPY BIRTHDAY VOYAGER Voyager 1's 'birthday', September 5th 1977

[@joopterwijn]

Really nice stuff, a "bit" outside my range, but really nice

[@MrPinknumber]

Love it !

[@sanguchito7381]

For those curious about the encoding and error correcting stuff, do yourself a favor and go watch Computerphile's 64 Shades Of Gray, kzbin.info/www/bejne/hIPZZHuDet6oeqc and kzbin.info/www/bejne/eaWydKSBpdmcbdU (not about Voyager, thou).

[@paulkerr2298]

big thumbs up from the old dart,, or glesga to the little guys

[@chuy8356]

This is fantastic and interesting stuff. I love astronomy.

[@davidcorbett341]

Great Stuff

[@Wonky4925]

I can recall these probes being launched

[@marxnutz]

As I understand it, Voyager is now transmitting at the equivalent of 5 trillionth of one watt of power, so I can easily see how difficult it would be to contact it.

[@geoffswan1254]

Legend!

[@unmanaged]

Nasa's X-Band is 8200-8600 MHz and I think that includes as a subset the X−band deep space allocation (International Telecommunications Union Category B) of 8,400 - 8,450 MHz.... right?

[@neatodd]

'Not like Beagle - that hit Mars' Ouch. Too soon :-(

[@mpsmith35]

neatodd Actually, photos show that it actually landed safely but it's solar petals failed to open properly. it's amazing to think it actually got to the surface.

[@1pcfred]

The USA is the only country to date that has ever successfully landed a mission on Mars. Though really not too many have even tried.

[@TiagoTiagoT]

+Mike Smith Would it be possible for another rover to go there and "manually" open the solar petals?

[@1pcfred]

+TiagoTiago while anything is possible it would be far easier just to land another mission on the surface than mount a rescue. The target landing ellipses are huge, and traveling on the surface is difficult. So I would have to say for all practical purposes no, it is not possible.

[@zapfanzapfan]

Maybe he was thinking of the Schiaparelli lander, that caused a new crater :-)

[@ghostdog688]

I know you can translate radio to sound to “hear” signals. What does voyager sound like?

[@thiskal]

A bunch of ones and Zero's nearly hidden amongst the noise

[@GoSlash27]

Depends on what stage of detection you listen to. It's phase shift encoding, so prior to feeding it into the quad coupler it'd just be a steady tone. If you could hear the output of the quad coupler, it'd sound like a dot- matrix printer without the carriage returns. Once it's detected, it's just serial TTL pulses, like RS-232 but much slower.

[@douro20]

I wonder what kind of frequency standard is aboard Voyager 2. I know that the DSN uses a hydrogen maser.

[@CJkoh1]

in case someone is wondering, here's a link to see what's the DNS is doing right now, all three of them! eyes.jpl.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html edit: just realize that Part 2 did show the website.

[@douglasbrunelle9854]

I was curious about the wind loading specs on the 70m antenna. And does a moderate wind distort the parabola enough to cause problems on receive and transmit?

[@flatfrog69rr71]

Hi Congrat's Dave for getting it back !! Can I ask you did the guy mention what was the gain of the different dishes? thanks

[@deadfreightwest5956]

Dave's Dish!

[@ntesla66]

Excellent!

[@ThomasHaberkorn]

how does that "doubling SNR with sending 320 bits/s" work mathematically? Does that method have a name which I can google up?

[@k7iq]

Is that 400 kW ERP or average output power of the Klystron (or whatever they use) ?

[@HDXFH]

Awesome

[@headybrew]

So do they have to aim the transmission to where Voyager will be 15 hours later? and then to receive, aim it where Voyager was 15 hours ago? Like trying to shoot a duck in flight? Or maybe the arc width of the beam is enough to cover the target without compensation for the distance traveled in the 30 hour round trip time?

[@thepuma2012]

probably..... also they tune a little of frequency because that even shifts a litle bit! (doppler effect)

[@andrewnorgrove6487]

Apparently Beagle didn't hit mars it just failed to open solar panels blocking communication with Canberra en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_2

[@WistrelChianti]

I found a good tutorial on convolutional encoder/decoder but so far not found out what multi convolutional encoder means? Is it something like re-encoding the encoded signal?