Project Cyclops, A Design... - Department of Earth and Planetary ...

14. CYCLOPS AS A RESEARCH TOOL
Throughout this first cut at the Cyclops system
design, the sole intent has been to optimize its performance
as an initial detector of intelligent transmissions.
Nevertheless, it has characteristics that may make it a
particularly desirable terminal for other deep space
studies. Just as the JPL 210 ft Deep Space Facility has
proved very useful in certain geodetic, radio and radar
astronomical studies, there are research areas where
Cyclops, once built, should have such special capability
that it may be worth devoting a fraction of its operating
time to these secondary research possibilities.
For example, consider a "3 km equivalent Cyclops."
Collecting area = 7X 106 m 2
= 2200 X (area of JPL- 210 ft)
= 6700 X (area of Haystack - 120 ft)
Angular resolution _- 1 arc sec at X = 3 cm
Instantaneous frequency bandwidths from 0.1 Hz to
100 Mz
Rapid frequency-band change in the range 0.5 - 10
GHz
Ability to operate in various subarray formats
Three research fields where these properties should be
particularly useful are discussed below.
DEEP-SPACE PROBES
The several-thousandfold increase in sensitivity and/
or bit rate capacity over present facilities could alter the
format of deep space exploration by probes. For
instance, with no appreciable change in probe design,
the same total information and bit rate would obtain for
observations of Uranus (mean orbital radius = 19.2 AU)
as are now possible for Mars (mean orbital radius = 1.52
AU). Alternatively, lighter and faster probes, using
the same launch facilities, could examine the remote
planets after appreciably shorter travel times than
present facilities permit (5 to 10 years, or more). This is
not the place to discuss possible tradeoffs in detail, but
it would seem likely that if a major consideration in
probe design were to change by a factor on the order of
103 a major change in probe strategy might result.
As another example, an important problem in solar
system physics concerns the nature and position of the
boundary between the solar wind and the interstellar
plasma (ref.l). Pioneer F will be launched early in 1972
and should reach Jupiter in about 650 days. After
Jupiter flyby, the probe will have a velocity sufficient to
escape the solar system, drifting outward radially at
about 2 AU/year. If the boundary of the heliosphere is
30-60 AU as some suspect, it will be a long time (in
human terms) before we know the answers to our
questions. Again, if Cyclops were available, it would
seem worthwhile to consider a light, fast probe bearin_
minimal instrumentation, that could reach the heliospheric
boundary in a much shorter time and relay back
information for as long a time as it continued on out
into the adjacent interstellar medium. Any experiment
possible using the JPL 210 ft facility could be carried on
at a distance (2.21X103) 1/2 ___47 times as great with
Cyclops.
RADAR
ASTRONOMY
Over the past decade, radar astronomy, using modest
equipment and highly developed analytical techniques,
has provided striking new data and insights in the field
of solar system physics. Because of power and antenna
limitations, its studies have been restricted in the main
to nearby objects: the Moon, Venus, and Mars. With our
3-km assumption, using Cyclops only as a receiving
terminal would extend the present radar capabilities by a
factor of 7 to 9 in range, depending on whether the
comparison is with the 210 ft or the 120 ft antennas. If
the same total transmitter power presently used is
installed in each element of the Cyclops array the range
of current experiments could be extended by factors of
165