From the very beginning of its association with NASA in 1958, the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory UPL) received its fair share of public
recognition for its successes and failures in pursuing the
exploration of deep space. It started with the Explorers, the first
American satellites to orbit Earth. Later there came the Rangers,
the first spacecraft to reach the surface of the Moon; the Mariner
spacecraft, first to visit Venus and Mars; and the Voyagers that
pushed the boundaries of deep space communication further out to
Jupiter and Saturn, and eventually to Uranus and Neptune. There
were other spacecraft that put landers, probes, or orbiters into
planetary orbits or atmospheres, or onto planetary surfaces. There
were probes whose mission was to explore the composition and
dynamics of the interplanetary medium, and probes to observe the
physics of the Sun. There were the huge missions, such as Viking to
Mars, Galileo to Jupiter, and Cassini to Saturn, and there were
small missions like Pathfinder to Mars and the New Millennium
missions to asteroids and comets. There was also science that did
not require a spacecraft for its experiments such as radio
astronomy, radar astronomy, and the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence. The public accolades that were engendered by the
bountiful science returned from all of these NASA projects were
shared by NASA and the scientists whose exquisite instruments and
innovative interpretation of the data produced the new knowledge
reflected in their results. However, what the press conferences,
news releases, and media coverage did not reveal was the incredibly
complex infrastructure that made each of these marvelous deep space
missions possible. This infrastructure, which had been built over
the years at JPL, included the Deep Space Network (DSN), an
essential, integral part of every mission. There was, in effect, a
relationship between the planetary missions, the spacecraft that
carried them out, and the Deep Space Network that enabled such
missions to be planned in the first place. Without the remarkable
improvement in performance of the DSN, scientific missions to the
distant planets would have been impossible. In 1964, when Mariner
IV flew past Mars and took a few photographs, the limitation of the
communication link meant that it took eight hours to return to
Earth a single photograph from the Red Planet. By 1989, when
Voyager observed Neptune, the DSN capability had increased so much
that almost real-time video could be received from the much more
distant planet, Neptune. It is timely that, some 40 years after its
inception, the Deep Space Network should be recognized for its
remarkable litany of progress in radio communications over vast
distances, thereby allowing planetary scientists to collect data
from sites throughout the solar system. This book succeeds in
bringing the history of the DSN forward for the attention of
curious, generally informed, or technical specialist readers.
Uplink-Downlink transforms the technical records of a major NASA
facility, unique in the world, into a viable historical narrative
covering 40 years of its critical involvement in the United States
space program. The Deep Space Network emerges from this study not
only as a complex, human-machine system of worldwide dimensions,
but also, more convincingly, as a focus for the aspirations of the
NASA scientists for ever-bigger science, and of the JPL engineers
for ever-greater innovation and enterprise in navigating to distant
targets and communicating at ever-greater data-rates, in spite of
the fluctuations in available NASA funding for both, driven in some
measure by the conflicting priorities of the piloted versus
unpiloted programs within NASA itself.
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