At 11:10 AM 6/19/2007, Peter Guelzow wrote:
Hi,
in March 2006 the VOYAGER-1 interstellar probe was received by the AMSAT-DL/IUZ team using the 20m dish in Bochum. Imagine that Voyager 1 is the furthest object away from earth build by humans. http://www.amsat-dl.org//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6...
A reception report including a poster was sent to the JPL team and a few days ago we received the following eMail, together with a nice picture of the Voyager Flight Team and our reception report in their hands.
" On June 6, 2007, the Voyager Flight Team opened the photo we received in the mail from you. Congratulations on your successful downlink acquisition of Voyager 1 at your 20 meter tracking station. Acquiring such a distant object is a remarkable achievement, especially for an amateur team. Thank you very much for your interest in Voyager. "
As a token of our appreciation, please find the attached photo of our team. Voyager Flight Team Members are, from left to right, Mr. Ed Massey - Project Manager, Steve Howard - Ground Data Systems Engineer, Thomas Weeks - Attitude Control Sensors Engineer, Regina Wong - Science Processing, Larry Zotarelli - Sequence Engineer, Pearline Johnson - Finance, Jim Jaeger - Data System Engineer, Roger Ludwig - Telecom & Sequence Integration Engineer, Sun Matsumoto - System Lead & Fault Protection Engineer, Enrique Medina - Attitude Control & Electrical Power Engineer, Glenda Sherman - Secretary, Jefferson Hall - Mission Director.
Sincerely, Roger Ludwig on behalf of the Voyager Flight Team "
The picture can be found here:
http://www.amsat-dl.org//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1...
Congratulations to our AMSAT-DL/IUZ team in Bochum for this huge achievement. It also demonstrates now officially that the 20m dish is good enough to support the AMSAT P5-A Mission to Mars
73s Peter DB2OS AMSAT-DL President
Peter and the AMSAT-DL/IUZ Bochum Team:
Very impressive accomplishment! As an amateur radio astronomer, I can appreciate what significance this has. Voyager-I used to be used as a calibration signal for many radio observatories until it passed beyond the point of a usable signal. Certainly, Mars will be much easier for you to do. I will be trying to receive the P5A signal from my home radio telescope (4.9m) as it transits to Mars.
I have another reason to appreciate your accomplishment, as many years ago I worked for JPL receiving Voyager-1 and 2 much closer to Earth. We used the 64m Mars dish (DSS-14) at Goldstone.
Eagerly awaiting the launch of P3E and later P5A.
73, Ed - KL7UW ====================================== BP40IQ 50-MHz - 10-GHz www.kl7uw.com 144-EME: FT-847, mgf-1801, 4x-xpol-20, 185w DUBUS Magazine USA Rep [email protected] ======================================