Deap Space Navigation

On Sat, 16 Dec 2006, Henry Spencer wrote:

A while back, I wrote:
It would also be very helpful to have a second southern-hemisphere DSN
site, perhaps in South America. Having only one can become a severe
bottleneck when busy parts of the solar system are in the southern sky.

As it turns out, some papers I'm reading now have a concrete example of
this. The combination of the launch timing and the exact trajectory
chosen for Mars Odyssey put its Earth-Mars cruise period mostly fairly
deep in the southern sky. Only the Canberra DSN station had contact with
it for the first month or two.

[discussion of VLBI-based navigation snipped]

I wonder whether someone could build a deep-space tracking station in Chile
or Argentina and *sell* tracking services to the governments who need it? I
don't suppose it would pay, unless one could achieve big savings in hardware
or infrastructure compared to government-operated stations.

You could supplement your income with military or commercial satellite
tracking, communications, radio astronomy, etc.

This might be a dumb idea. Even if it looked potentially profitable, it
would be hard to finance without firm committments from government
customers.

--
Bill Higgins | "The victors write the histories,
Fermilab | and also the DNA sequences."
| --Barry Gehm

In article v,
Bill Higgins wrote:
I wonder whether someone could build a deep-space tracking station in Chile
or Argentina and *sell* tracking services to the governments who need it? ...
This might be a dumb idea. Even if it looked potentially profitable, it
would be hard to finance without firm committments from government
customers.

The investment needed for deep-space stuff is pretty steep, I fear, and
most of the likely customers already have *some* facilities of their own
(e.g., ESA has just finished building itself a couple of sizable dishes),
so making a financial case for it could be hard.

There already is an outfit -- Universal Space Network Inc. -- that sells
dish time, but its dishes are smaller stuff (up to 15m) meant primarily
for Earth-orbit work.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

Henry Spencer wrote:
In article v,
Bill Higgins wrote:
I wonder whether someone could build a deep-space tracking station in Chile
or Argentina and *sell* tracking services to the governments who need it? ...
This might be a dumb idea. Even if it looked potentially profitable, it
would be hard to finance without firm committments from government
customers.

The investment needed for deep-space stuff is pretty steep, I fear, and
most of the likely customers already have *some* facilities of their own
(e.g., ESA has just finished building itself a couple of sizable dishes),
so making a financial case for it could be hard.

There already is an outfit -- Universal Space Network Inc. -- that sells
dish time, but its dishes are smaller stuff (up to 15m) meant primarily
for Earth-orbit work.

Well, who owns Arecebo? And is there another, possibly smaller, crater
that might be available for a similar installation? Yeah, you have a
sidelobe problem and some issues unless you can get it perfectly parabolic,
but in terms of dBi per dollar it seems the best approach on a budget.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

In article ,
Scott Dorsey wrote:
The investment needed for deep-space stuff is pretty steep, I fear...

Well, who owns Arecebo?

Some combination of Cornell (which runs it) and the US government (which
funds it). It's probably officially government property, with Cornell
just the operator.

And is there another, possibly smaller, crater
that might be available for a similar installation? Yeah, you have a
sidelobe problem and some issues unless you can get it perfectly parabolic,
but in terms of dBi per dollar it seems the best approach on a budget.

Valleys with vaguely suitable shapes, you can find. The big problem is
that an Arecibo-type dish is not very steerable. It can only look at
things in a limited range of celestial latitudes, and even if your target
is in that strip of sky, you only get one short look each day. For
communications, I doubt that the greater collecting area makes up for
this.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message
...

Well, who owns Arecebo?

I believe NSF.

And is there another, possibly smaller, crater
that might be available for a similar installation? Yeah, you have a
sidelobe problem and some issues unless you can get it perfectly
parabolic,
but in terms of dBi per dollar it seems the best approach on a budget.

Except you get much more limited steering.


--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

A friend visited Greenbank national observatory recently. All but one
dish is mothballed stored pointing straight up. Seems no one wants to
buy user time on any but the largest dish there.

Maybe there is just too much radio noise to use small dishes.

Brian

--
Brian Gaff....Note, this account does not accept Bcc: email.
graphics are great, but the blind can't hear them
Email:
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wrote in message
ps.com...
A friend visited Greenbank national observatory recently. All but one
dish is mothballed stored pointing straight up. Seems no one wants to
buy user time on any but the largest dish there.

"Brian Gaff" wrote in message
news
Maybe there is just too much radio noise to use small dishes.


Most likely not at Greenbank. It's in a valley where all other radios are
banned. In fact non-diesel engines are banned because the spark plugs
interfere with the radio receiving.


Brian

--
Brian Gaff....Note, this account does not accept Bcc: email.
graphics are great, but the blind can't hear them
Email:
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________


wrote in message
ps.com...
A friend visited Greenbank national observatory recently. All but one
dish is mothballed stored pointing straight up. Seems no one wants to
buy user time on any but the largest dish there.

A friend visited Greenbank national observatory recently. All but one
dish is mothballed stored pointing straight up. Seems no one wants to
buy user time on any but the largest dish there.

Well, the Howard E. Tatel telescope, for example, is 26 meter.

That's pretty small by Deep Space Network standards. I couldn't give
numbers, but this isn't the only unused radio telescope in this size
range (I remember one in Colorado that people wanted to use for an
amateur Mars missions for example).

Bill Higgins writes:


I wonder whether someone could build a deep-space tracking station in Chile
or Argentina and *sell* tracking services to the governments who need it? I
don't suppose it would pay, unless one could achieve big savings in hardware
or infrastructure compared to government-operated stations.


NASA *had* a site in Chile. As it happens, I took a trip there for
wholly unrelated reasons with another engineer who decades before,
had worked for Huge Aircrash Corp. {as he called it} constructing
the station. He'd been in Santiago when Pinochet assassinated Allende.
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