Bob Gershman, Deputy Manager of the Science and Sequence Office until this spring, served as the mission planning liaison between scientists and design engineers so that resources were not oversubscribed. The team used every innovation they could think of to refine, compress, and package the data so that only the most valuable information entered that slim pipeline to Earth. The Challenge on the DSN Side. The signal from the spacecraft has about the power of the 20-watt lightbulb in your refrigerator. Through improvements on the ground and data editing and compression onboard, the effective information rate was increased by a factor of about 100.
Superior software enables the station to maintain lock while changing data rate in several steps.
It was a lot of work. Early in 1995, the S-Band Team, led by Dean Hardi, started installing the equipment in DSN stations and testing it around the clock as the spacecraft sped toward Jupiter. The Challenge for Ground Systems. Data from the DSN is further processed by the Ground Systems Office for analysis by the scientists. She had interfaced with the CDS people to negotiate the structure of the telemetry at bit-level, specifying processing requirements for ground systems.