Spacecraft Telecommunications
T. Joseph W. Lazio, Sami Asmar (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology)
(Submitted on 19 Oct 2018)
There is a long history of radio telescopes being used to augment the radio antennas regularly used to conduct telemetry, tracking, and command of deep space spacecraft. Radio telescopes are particularly valuable during short-duration mission critical events, such as planetary landings, or when a mission lifetime itself is short, such as a probe into a giant planet’s atmosphere. By virtue of its high sensitivity and frequency coverage, the next-generation Very Large Array would be a powerful addition to regular spacecraft ground systems. Further, the science focus of many of these deep-space missions provides a “ground truth” in the solar system that complements other aspects of the ngVLA’s science case, such as the formation of planets in proto-planetary disks.
Comments: 6 pages, 1 figure; To be published in the ASP Monograph Series, “Science with a Next-Generation VLA”, ed. E. J. Murphy (ASP, San Francisco, CA)
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:1810.09268 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:1810.09268v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: Joseph Lazio
[v1] Fri, 19 Oct 2018 04:14:59 GMT (111kb)
