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I’d put in the distance from memory. It is actually “only” 134au so that increases the angle a bit but not much. Sorry about that!
Yes, sending commands to Voyager 2 is a lot harder than receiving the telemetry. The spacecraft receiver is a bit unstable due to a capacitor failure and the noise temperature is high since the antenna is effectively looking at the Sun. The only ground station in the DSN that can command Voyager 2 is DSS-43 at Canberra. This has a huge 400kW power amplifier (the other 70-m stations have 20kW) but there are all sorts of restrictions on its use. I wouldn’t want to be a bird in the beam of that thing when it is transmitting at full power.
If you want some fun bedtime reading have a look at these links:
https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/Descanso4–Voyager_new.pdf
http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsndocs/810-005/101/101E.pdf
https://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsndocs/810-005/relnotice49.pdf
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/18956/has-dss-43-ever-been-used-in-high-power-mode-20-kw-for-an-emergency-situation
- This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by Nick James.