NASA shows how it will talk to spacecraft over 15 billion miles away

Six antennas pointed as an array at NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft. Credit: MDSCC / INTA / Francisco "Paco" Moreno

We're going to need a bigger antenna.

For the first time, NASA's Deep Space Network — which communicates with the agency's legendary Voyager 1 spacecraft — pointed all six of the large antenna dishes at its Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex at the interstellar craft. Combining antennas together, aka "arraying," allows NASA to create a bigger overall antenna and pick up ever-fainter signals from Voyager 1, a craft over 15 billion miles away — and counting. Already, engineers need a five-antenna array to gather unprecedented data from a Voyager instrument.

"As Voyager gets further away, six antennas will be needed," the space agency explained in a statement.

Voyager 1 and 2, launched in 1977, have left the sun's influence and are the only human-built craft to enter interstellar space. So the data they're returning is invaluable.

"The science data that the Voyagers are returning gets more valuable the farther away from the Sun they go, so we are definitely interested in keeping as many science instruments operating as long as possible," Linda Spilker, Voyager's project scientist, said last year

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The instrument that requires six antennas, the Plasma Wave System (PWS) instrument, detects the interstellar gas the craft are passing through.

The Deep Space Network's Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex, with all six antennas arrayed together. Credit: MDSCC / INTA / Francisco "Paco" Moreno

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NASA's Deep Space Network, or DSN, has three disparate locations spaced around Earth, allowing different missions to connect with the network (it currently supports over 40 space endeavors). They're located in Barstow, California, near Madrid, Spain, and near Canberra, Australia. "Madrid is the only deep space communication complex currently with six operational antennas (the other two complexes have four apiece)," the agency explained. "Each complex consists of one 70-meter (230-foot) antenna and several 34-meter (112-foot) antennas."

The Voyager craft, nearing a half-century of operation, may potentially return unprecedented science data through the mid-2030s, when they exhaust their finite nuclear fuel supply. Yet out in interstellar space, another threat looms, too: harmful radiation called galactic cosmic rays. These high speed particles, many of which are created by dramatic star explosions called supernovae, can trip Voyagers' memory, or permanently damage aging computers (which may have recently occurred). It's dangerous in the realm between the stars, billions of miles away.

"We are dodging bullets out there," Alan Cummings, a cosmic-ray physicist at Caltech — the research university that manages NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory — recently told Mashable.

Mark is an award-winning journalist and the science editor at Mashable. After communicating science as a ranger with the National Park Service, he began a reporting career after seeing the extraordinary value in educating the public about the happenings in earth sciences, space, biodiversity, health, and beyond. 

You can reach Mark at [email protected].

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