LiveChat Roundup: Dec. 1, 2011

It's been a while since our last LiveChat Roundup, but we took last week off for the Thanksgiving holiday so it's not too bad. Hope your Thanksgiving was a happy one!

Last night, 131 OLC members participated in a LiveChat about the Deep Space Network. Giving the chat was a team of intrepid subject matter experts from the Jet Propulsion laboratory, who braved hurricane force winds, downed trees, and a center evacuation (well, others went home early) to be with us. Ota Lutz from K-12 Education and Chris Jacobs, a Deep Space Navigation Engineer, talked to us about how we communicate with our spacecraft scattered across and to the edge of our Solar System.  It takes big ears, in the form of dish antenna to recover the faint transmissions from these distant craft.
Here are a few of the questions asked and answered after the chat:

Fiona asks: How long does it take for the communications between the Mars rovers by the time the messages have gone from the rover to the orbiter to Earth to JPL to the Mars mission control room? Thank you for doing this chat, I've really enjoyed it.

Communication time with any spacecraft around Mars or any planet depends on the relative distance between Earth and that planet. Typically, for Mars, this time varies between 12 and 20 minutes, one way.

 Rachel asks: You said that voyager is running off of less power than a cellphone; do we use any of that technology now, in cellphones or anything else?

Tons of space technology is used every day here on Earth by every one of us. Check out this website:  http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/ 

Grace asks: What is the future for the DSN? What accomplishments can be expected in the next 20 years?

The DSN in the next few years will move from 8 GHz to 32 GHz in order to increase our capability to receive a greater amount of data. We look forward to learning amazing science from our upcoming missions including the Mars Science Laboratory and Juno.

You can join in on the chat by watching the archive, taking the quiz, and checking out the extra questions and answers in the Discussion Board (look in the Forum 'Chat Talk').  Then, try your hand at building a scale model of a DSN antenna by finding the short activity in the Discover page.

Never been to a chat? Sign up now for next Thursday's LiveChat featuring a special guest: Wilbur Wright will talk about the History of Aviation. It promises to be an interesting evening!