On March 25th, 2009 a team from the German space organisation AMSAT-DL reached another milestone on its way to an own interplanetary probe towards planet Mars. The ground station at the Bochum observatory transmitted radio signals to Venus. After traveling almost 100 million kilometers and a round trip delay of about 5 minutes, they were clearly received as echoes from the surface of Venus. Receiving planetary echoes is a première in Germany and Europe. In addition, this is the farthest distance crossed by radio amateurs, over 100 times further than echoes from the moon (EME reflexions).
For receiving the EVE (Earth-Venus-Earth) reflections, an FFT analysis with an integration time of 5 minutes was used. After integrating for 2 minutes only, the reflected signals were clearly visible in the display. Despite the bad weather, signals from Venus could be detected from 1038UT on until the planet reached the local horizon.
The high power amplifier which is described in the current AMSAT-DL journal has therefore passed this crucial test as a final key component for the planned P5-A Mars mission. By receiving generated echoes from Venus, the ground and command station for the Mars probe has been cleared for operational use and the AMSAT-Team is now gearing up for building the P5-A space probe. For financing the actual construction and launch, AMSAT-DL is currently in negotiation with the DLR (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt) among others, to obtain financial support for the remaining budget of 20 Mill EUR.
AMSAT-DL wants to show that low-budget interplanetary exploration is possible with its approach.
More information and the link to the official press release:
http://www.amsat-dl.org//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1...
The EVE experiment was repeated on Thursday, March 26th for several hours with good echoes from Venus. Morse code was used to transmit the well known „HI“ signature known from the AMSAT OSCAR satellites.
73s de DB2OS
Peter Guelzow President AMSAT-DL