A couple years ago, JPL stopped giving the weekly status reports for the Voyager spacecraft. These were great little summaries in plain English regarding the status of the craft, the data they returned, any commands sent, etc.
Now, due to workload, we get the planned schedule (Space Flight Operations Schedule) instead. Here’s the one for December 29th, 2016 to January 23rd, 2017 (pdf).
Anybody able to translate these?
This is what I can decipher from the report:
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Each page is split horizontally, with Voyager 1’s info on top, and 2’s on the bottom.
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Each page is 24 hours in a linear schedule ( 2 lines, one for PST, one for UTC).
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Daily the spacecraft will be pinged (?) at UTC noon and UTC midnight to gauge the craft’s round trip light time (RTLT). Or is this simply a calculation of the crafts’ RTLT and is not regularly verified?
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The bottom quarter of each crafts’ report shows which part of the Deep Space Network will be communicating with the craft at what time.
Anybody able to confirm, correct, or add to the above info?
Take a look at page 16 on the above .pdf.
It looks like a bunch of commands will be sent in the early morning to Voyager 1 to do a gyroscope check? Then later in the day, there’s a bunch more activity that’s less obvious (anybody know what TAPPOS is, besides small Spanish dishes?)
Finally, is there a summary available of the data that the Voyagers are returning?