Voyager 2 PWS Jupiter Flyby, July 9, 1979

Описание: Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Jupiter on this date exactly 45 years ago. To mark the anniversary, we present all available plasma wave audio data acquired on the day of flyby, July 9, 1979. This video is about 1 hour 35 minutes in duration and is mostly boring (authentic) data . . . You've been warned. (I see I didn't truncate a spacecraft clock value correctly, resulting in some bonus frames from July 8. You're welcome!)

The PWS plasma wave instrument on Voyager 2 recorded these signals as the spacecraft flew past the giant planet, travelling from about 19 Jupiter radii ahead of Jupiter to about 10 Jupiter radii past Jupiter. Note the large gap in data between early in the day to about 18:00 due to yielding telemetry to the imagers. These are the authentic sounds of Jupiter in contrast to the multitude of artistic interpretations and "therapeutic" mixes found on YouTube that may be based on PWS data, but have been highly manipulated and sound very little like the original signals. The audio presented here is not shifted in frequency and not filtered or mixed with music.

The PWS wideband waveform instruments on the two Voyager spacecraft sample the electric field on the dipole wire antenna at a rate of 28800 4-bit samples per second, using an automatic gain control. Consequently, the audio is just slightly better than telephone quality. Packets of 1600 samples are acquired, separated by the equivalent of 128 missing samples. Running these packets together results in the playback taking less than real-time (by a factor of 1600 / 1728), and also introduces a slight audible flutter. The amplitudes at the edges of these packets have been smoothed to reduce this flutter, but this is the only modification to the signal.

The video shows a series of 48-second-wide spectrograms with an animated cursor that shows the time of the audio track. The amplitude of the signals is color coded with dark blue for the weakest and red for the strongest signals. Low frequencies are at the bottom of the plot and high frequencies are at the top. Time ranges from left to right.

Much of the most interesting sound is actually onboard interference from other instruments. See the description of these interference signals in the Voyager 1 Saturn video at    • Voyager 1 PWS Saturn Encounter audio 1980 ...  

For more information on the Voyager project, see
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

For more information on the Voyager plasma wave investigations, see
https://space.physics.uiowa.edu/plasm...

For more information on space audio, see
https://space-audio.org/

For more videos related to space audio, see my YouTube channel
   / @space-audio  

Please note the disclaimers under "About Space Audio" on my YouTube channel. This is not a presentation of scientific findings and I am not representing any organization.