Amateur Records the "Sound" of Mars Express 52
gyrogeerloose writes "A French amateur radio operator who built his own ground station using equipment from an abandoned telecom uplink site has listened in on the ESA's Mars Express space probe. While his antenna is too small to allow him to download actual data, he was able to record and convert the signal of the probe's X-Band transmitter into an audio file."
Re:I need a subject? OK (Score:2, Informative)
better pick a later year, as i recall watching mork & mindy on nick at nite well into the 90s.
What was in that carrier? (Score:3, Informative)
The article does explain it. I read about it the other day, that they commanded the craft to stop sending data, and only send a steady carrier. They will measure the very tiny variations in the doppler shift that the Phobos flyby caused, to determine the composition and distribution of its mass. (Is the core hollow, that kind of thing.)
Re:not much to say (Score:2, Informative)
low rate data is BPSK modulated on a subcarrier which is then phase modulated on the main carrier with a mod index (or deviation) that is chosen to balance the power in the "data" and the power in the "carrier". Since the carrier power is used for navigation (e.g. the Phobos flyby) you don't suppress it all.
All is revealed in documents at http://www.ccsds.org/ or http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsndocs/810-005/
Knock yourselves out... you'll be able to demodulate the bits, do the decoding, find the frames.. after that it's a bit tricky to find the science data and decommutate it..