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Voyager 1 has the wrong atittude?

Posted: 17.11.2004, 15:25
by svennis
admiring voyager 1 i was surprised to find that the parabolic antenna does not appear to point at earth but off at perhaps more than 90 degrees.

Is this correct? are they being controlled by the secondary antennas? or is this a mistake?

Svennis

Posted: 17.11.2004, 15:42
by selden
While the trajectory is right, the orientation of the model within Celestia should be considered random. It changed in unpredictable (to us) ways during the flight. Unfortunately, xyz trajectory files don't (yet?) allow for the inclusion of orientation information.

If you want, you can construct an SSC catalog which defines the orientations of the Voyager probes for their current locations. Of course, their orientations would be wrong when you look at them during their planetary flybys, but they're wrong anyway.