signals pick up as they ripple past planets, moons,
and asteroids provides a window onto our cosmic
neighborhood. In some instances, the static is as
valuable as the message itself.EMBEDDED IN THE FLOOR of a room in the Jet
Propulsion Lab’s campus is a plaque that reads
THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE. Every signal from
every object we send out into the solar system trav-
els into and out of this facility. The so-called Dark
Room—whose dimness brightens in the glow of
dozens of monitors—has been staffed 24/7 since
the earliest days of the Deep Space Network. Not
much can shut down operations here. Not rain, not
most earthquakes, not even a fire. When a blaze did
break out several years ago, the engineers tended
the terminals remotely through the smoke, lest
they miss even one call from space.
At the moment, huddled around a pair of
screens, two bearded men stare at a string
of numbers and color-coded lines. It’s a down-
link, coming from the probe Juno, which has been
orbiting Jupiter since 2016. Mike Levesque, who
manages the network’s operations and relevant
Dark Room activities, stands nearby, watch-
ing, explaining the process. “Those are the datasystems operators,” he
says, nodding at the two
bearded men. “It’s their
job to extract the spacecraft information”—the
temperature, the fuel, what’s turned on, what’s
turned off—“and send it to mission support.” On
Voyager I, for instance, of 160 bits, only about 10
are relevant to the goings-on aboard the craft.
The rest of the packets of data travel elsewhere,
mostly to scientists, not engineers. The former
care about what instruments tell us about the space
around the probe, rather than the probe itself.
The two men in front of the screens run pro-
grams that clean up all the ones and zeros. But
sometimes they save the noise because the inter-
ference is also of interest. As a signal propagates
through any medium, getting pummeled by an
atmosphere or a gravitational field, resulting
changes in the wave reveal truths about space.
“When a craft is moving through something in-
teresting, noise data is going to be what we
want,” Levesque says. In those moments, “the
noise in the signal turns out to be science.”
When that happens, the data goes to Kamal
Oudrhiri, who heads JPL’s Planetary Radar &
Radio Sciences Group. To understand his field,
he explains, it helps to imagine a school bus full
of children. The driver’s singular objective is to
safely deliver all the kids. But what if you didn’t
care about the rugrats at all? What if, instead,
what really interested you was the bus?
The schoolchildren in Oudrhiri’s analogy areI’m Listening
Isolated in the
Mojave Desert,
the 21-story
DSS-14 dish can
hear calls from
space probes in
—and beyond—the
solar system.PG -- 69NA
SA