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The human fascination with the world around them has prompted
the exploration of our planet, from climbing the highest mountains,
to plunging the greatest oceans depths. Equally, our fascination
with the universe around us has taken humanity from the relatively
safe confines of the Earth’s biosphere into the black, unforgiving
vacuum of space.
The space race began on the
4th of October 1957, when the former USSR launched a rocket from
the Baikonur cosmodrome, and carried a tiny 83.6kg aluminium
sphere named Sputnik 1 into Earth orbit. For the first time an
object built on Earth was in space—the world’s first
artificial satellite.
On 2nd January 1959, the Soviet
Union launched the Luna 1 spacecraft, followed on the 3rd of
March by the United States with the launch of Pioneer 4. Escaping
the Earth’s gravitational pull, they reached the Moon, passing
above its surface before eventually going into an orbit around
the Sun.
These two craft heralded the
advent of interplanetary travel. The scientific community could
now seriously begin looking towards the Moon and the planets
as objects of exploration.
To accomplish this, a communications
network was needed that could receive and transmit information
and instructions between the spacecraft and controllers back
on Earth.
Early attempts by the US Army
to launch robotic spacecraft were supported through a series
of ground stations set up in California, Nigeria, and Singapore,
that were managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
In December 1958, JPL was transferred
from the US Army to the newly formed NASA, and a decision was
made to form a more comprehensive arrangement of receiving stations,
the Deep Space Network.
These stations would be responsible
for the tracking and relay of information between mission operations
centres at JPL and their interplanetary spacecraft.
The CDSCC can be thought of as a post office. The giant antennas
allow two-way transfer of packages of information between spacecraft,
millions or sometimes billions of kilometres away, and the research
scientists on Earth.
The sorts of radio signals sent to the spacecraft are generally
instructions about course corrections, systems maintenance, instrument
functioning, and commands for data collection, storage, and transmission.
The signals received from the
spacecraft can include images of planetary topography or measurements
of atmospheric conditions, surface composition, and magnetic
fields. Telemetry collected can also include information about
the position, and health of the spacecraft. |
