Longreads:
When a mission launches into space, whether it is to Venus, Mars, or as far out as Pluto, we have to be able to track it, send commands, and receive data — all over a signal about as powerful as the wattage of a refrigerator light bulb. These faint whispers are hard to hear, and losing track of them for any length of time can be a harrowing experience. If the Deep Space Network goes down, if we permanently lose our connection to Cassini, it would not only be a loss of billions of dollars but also two decades of work.
The heart of the Deep Space Network started beating on Christmas Eve 1963, when JPL confirmed their long-term intentions of sending missions into deep space. It hasn’t been turned off since. Its dishes, operators, and radio astronomers around the world have worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the past 54 years. The DSN has many vital roles, but one of its biggest is to serve as the communication link between Earth and its robotic emissaries in deep space — anything from the moon and beyond. Every image we’ve ever received from deep space, every relay of scientific data, even those famous words the Eagle has landed, was collected by the dishes of the Deep Space Network.
I love these stories of scientists quietly working behind the scenes to provide us with information like this.
I just recently visited the DSN in Madrid — one of three locations DSN has so that it can always be in contact, as the earth spins. The large dishes are awesome to see, and you stand their pondering their role in connecting us with our solar system and beyond. Without them, we would literally know nothing about what’s going on.
As computer geeks, we can appreciate how difficult this is — it’s part of why we invited JPL’s interplanetary networking guru, Sandy Krasner, to come speak at MacTech Conference a few years back. To hear Sandy talk about the unbelievably long latency (20+ min to Mars, if I recall) … and how they had to create interplanetary networking standards, and think about how to deal with data gaps, loss of signal, long latency and more was truly interesting.
I share your sentiments about these folks working behind the scenes. It’s part of why we’ve made sure that we bring them, and space exploration, to the forefront of every MacTech Conference to date (this year will be our 9th year).
Not just scientists but engineers as well: I was a software engineer on the team that performed system performance tests for the telemetry processing assembly at DSN back in the late ’70s.