After six years of work on two new dishes for the NASA/CSIRO deep space network, the second dish has finally been finished.

http://mashable.com/2016/11/02/dss36-nasa-antenna-australia/

“The two dishes, both 34 metres wide, are beam waveguide antennas. Rather than housing their transmitter receiver systems in the dish, the systems are located underground in a concrete cylinder two storeys underground.”

mollwollfumble said:

After six years of work on two new dishes for the NASA/CSIRO deep space network, the second dish has finally been finished.

http://mashable.com/2016/11/02/dss36-nasa-antenna-australia/

“The two dishes, both 34 metres wide, are beam waveguide antennas. Rather than housing their transmitter receiver systems in the dish, the systems are located underground in a concrete cylinder two storeys underground.”

Under construction.

NASA’s deep space network is celebrating its 50th anniversary.

Wow! This is a good website, it tells you what NASA’s deep space network is communicating with right now in real time.

https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html

As I write, Madrid is talking with, it’s just gone off air. Goldstone is talking with Voyager 1 and others. Canberra is talking with SOHO, Juno, and Stereo A spacecraft.

That’s interesting, the signal from old SOHO is 100 times as strong as for any other deep space spacecraft. Probably because back in 1995 they were less sure of how good the receiver here on Earth would be. Back then, 10^-14 Watts was probably though of as a weak signal.

While talking Juno.

“This composite image depicts Jupiter’s cloud formations as seen through the eyes of Juno’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR) instrument as compared to the top layer, a Cassini Imaging Science Subsystem image of the planet. The MWR can see a couple of hundred kilometers into Jupiter’s atmosphere with its largest antenna. The belts and bands visible on the surface are also visible in modified form in each layer below.”

South pole flyby

In more NASA news.

Cassini makes a video of clouds moving around in Titan’s atmosphere.

Curiosity takes measurements of an iron-nickel-phosphorus meteorite at Murray Formation on Mars.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/