From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4@msn.com)
Date: Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:25:24 PST
We had another attempt to send a precession maneuver for Pioneer 10
last Friday night, but station DSS-14 at Goldstone, here in
California, had a wave guide coolant leak and could not support a 400
KW up-link. We had the command file built using the Osprey PC
standing in for the PDP 11/44 and we were ready to send the command
file down to the DSN.
I want to personally thank again Al Morgan of Strobe Data in Redmond
Washington. The folks there have let me use their PDP emulator as I
had run out of parts to cannibalize to fix the old PDP.
The 486 processor on the emulator board runs the old RSX 11M+ plus
operating system and the COSMOS program we have doesn't even know it
is running on a PC. (stopped down to 9 meg Hz which is about twice as
fast as the 8085 chip that is in the PDP.)
http://www.strobedata.com/home/mainpage.htm
Since Earth has rounded the horn and is coming back into Pioneer 10's
antenna pattern, we should be able to get data in December with an
up-link December 5th and the down link December 6th.
SETI at Arecibo will look for the Pioneer 10 signal and DSS-63 in
Spain will see if they can lock up on data. (DOY 340 0225 0255 0555
0610) (needs final verification of track schedule) Will see how it
goes.
We may be good through April of 2003 antenna pattern wise. Who knows
how low the power can go on Pioneer 10 before you can't transmit.
Without the precession maneuver the Sun will eventually drag us away
from where Pioneer 10 is pointing and in fact, Pioneer 10 is also on
a stretched out arc, so periodic re-pointing keeps you lined up with
each other.
Again, thanks to Strobe Data for providing the opportunity to
command. We know the NOP commands that were sent earlier on worked
and I am sure the CONSCAN commands would have gone also. Come next
year the DSN will be changing the hardware configuration and we will
lose the ability to command there. Still no one thought we would
still be listening to the old bird this long and it gives one a warm
fuzzy feeling when you see the data displayed on a program you wrote
back in 1993. See LabVIEW display. - LRK -
http://spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects/pioneer/PNStat.html
Larry
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:40:10 PST