Good day.

There will be and attempt to contact Pioneer 10 this week, March 3, 4, and 5.
Earth has come around the Sun and will be directly within Pioneer 10's antenna pattern, if an antenna pattern there might be. Might be, because the fixed frequency oscillator is dead and the only way to wake up the spacecraft is to send up a strong signal which will wake up the variable frequency oscillator and let the spacecraft send back a signal at a known offset from what it sees coming up.

This will be the last time Earth will be here as the Sun drags us along as it goes on its way around the Solar System. Each year Earth moves over just a bit in space and in the past you could command Pioneer 10 to re-align itself to look at a 400 KW up-link signal from Earth but there is not enough power on board Pioneer 10 to do that now and no one is sending commands anyway. [Mission long over and I took all the equipment out of the Pioneer Operations space, sorry.]

[36 pictures of what is NOT there now, including me. Don't click on the link unless you have the time for them to down load. :-( ] http://lkellogg.vttoth.com/LarryRussellKellogg/PioneerPic.html

If Pioneer 10 is heard from then maybe they will get some Radio Science and some Doppler information that will give one more data point in understanding the Pioneer Anomaly. The Pioneer Master Data Records that have been saved are also being used to understand what the spacecraft was doing for 30 years.

I don't think there will be any data received from the spacecraft even if it is heard from as there have been hardware modifications at the Deep Space Network that took out some of the old equipment that was used in decoding the down link, and of course there isn't any hardware at all to look at the data where I used to work. [Those pictures above that you didn't look at.]
Will let you know if I hear of any successes in listening to the old bird.
:-)

Thanks for looking up with me.

Larry Kellogg
Web Site: http://lkellogg.vttoth.com/LarryRussellKellogg/
BlogSpot: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/
RSS link: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Newsltr.: https://news.altair.com/mailman/listinfo/lunar-update
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[Second page of a 12 page Power Point presentation describing the upcoming support. Good luck in understanding the acronyms. - LRK -]

* Three Supports performed over three days
-- DOY 062, 063, and 064 (March 3, 4, and 5)
* 70-m antenna used
* 400 kW uplink power
* Three different tune profiles for capturing the transponder
* Antenna's low noise path utilized
* Radio Science monitoring downlink for signal detection
* DTT system configured for throughput mode if acquisition is achieved.
* NOPE monitoring supports in ROC
* The Pioneer 10 RTLT is 24:56:25 (hh:mm:ss)
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Maybe some help. - LRK -
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/basics/glossary.html
http://dsnra.jpl.nasa.gov/technical/acronyms.html

DTT Downlink Telemetry and Tracking Subsystem
Successor to the BVR in the NSP era.

NOPE Network Operations Project Engineer

BVR Block V Receiver
Standard DSN telemetry receiver: input typically two 300 MHz I.F.s, output
two digital data streams. This will be replaced by the DTT in the NSP era.

NSP Network Simplication Plan
Upgrade of the DSN controller subsystems

ROC ???

RTLT Round Trip Light Time
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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK
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