vac@sam.cs.cmu.edu (Vincent Cate) (10/08/90)
NASA Headline News / Peter E. Yee: >NASA will use an additional satellite transponder during the STS-41 >Ulysses mission to enable reception of NASA Select television in >Alaska and Hawaii -- which are too far north or west for reception of the >NASA programming on Satcom F2R. The additional satellite is Spacenet >1, transponder 17. Edited, two hour summaries of the day's NASA Select >programming will be transmitted on Spacenet 1 each day of the STS-41 >mission from 12:01 to 2:01 am EDT. Did anyone find the summary last night? I looked for it after 1:30 and did not find it. Is Spacenet 1 transponder 17 really the right place? Is it just that Pittsburgh PA (which is not near Alaska or Hawaii) is not in the broadcast footprint? If so, its too bad because it would be nice to be able to record a 2 hour summary each day. >NASA Select TV: Satcom F2R, Transponder 13, C-Band, 72 degrees West >Longitude, Audio 6.8, Frequency 3960 MHz. I have been a bit disappointed in the coverage so far. Most of the time when I have checked they have been showing mission control without any audio (talk about boring). The second most common thing seems to be computer graphics. Only once out of about 10 times that I have looked have I actually caught them showing the output of a camera that was in orbit and it did not last very long. I have noticed that there is also NASA stuff on F2 transponder 5. Most of the time this just has some text that includes STS-41 but it has been used to show extra cameras during launch and was even showing the view from space (although only in black and white) that I saw on transponder 13. Given that I have seen stuff on 2 stations and there is supposed to be stuff on a third I am wondering, has anyone found any others? It amazes me that with cameras in orbit they are showing what they are (mostly boring ground based stuff). Are they only able to send video from the shuttle during very limited portions of the orbit? Assuming this is the problem, does anyone know how limited this is and what portions (seems that near Florida might be good). -- Vince
johnl@n3dmc.svr.md.us (John Limpert) (10/08/90)
vac@sam.cs.cmu.edu (Vincent Cate) writes: >It amazes me that with cameras in orbit they are showing what they >are (mostly boring ground based stuff). Are they only able to send >video from the shuttle during very limited portions of the orbit? The video has to be downlinked through the ground network (GN), voice and telemetry can be routed through the space network (SN aka TDRSS). The video also uses the same transmitter that is used for tape recorder dumps. There are only two stations left in the ground network, Merritt Island, Florida (MIL) and Bermuda (BDA). I'm not sure how much video support (if any) is provided by the Deep Space Network (DSN), NOAA or DOD. -- John A. Limpert The strongest reason for the people to retain the right johnl@n3dmc.svr.md.us to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect uunet!n3dmc!johnl themselves against tyranny in government. T. Jefferson.
vac@sam.cs.cmu.edu (Vincent Cate) (10/08/90)
NASA Headline News / Peter E. Yee: >The additional satellite is Spacenet 1, transponder 17. Edited, two hour >summaries of the day's NASA Select programming will be transmitted on >Spacenet 1 each day of the STS-41 mission from 12:01 to 2:01 am EDT. Tonight it is on S1 transponder 18, not 17 (I found nothing lastnight). This is much more interesting than the full NASA Select coverage. -- Vince
hughes@star.dec.com (Gary Hughes - VMS Development) (10/09/90)
There is usually a daily 'highlights' transmitted on F2/13around 8pm EDT or so for each flight day. The length and time varies, but if you are taping these are usually worth finding. I suspect that this is what get replayed on S1/18. You can find the mission TV schedule on the NASA Spacelink BBS. BTW, I noticed that F2/05 was carrying some odd frame sequential multiplexed video before the STS-41 launch. In real time, it looked like two images superimposed but when taped and played back in slo-mo there appeared to be field from one source followed by two fields from another. These were regular NTSC frames, not the wideband frame sequential color format sometimes used for the wideband TDRSS video. gary hughes @star.dec.com