Voyager Image Data Compression and Block Encoding

Abstract

Telemetry enhancement techniques implemented through flight software modifications and utilization of special flight hardware enable the Voyager 2 spacecraft to reduce telemetry transmission rates used at Saturn by over 50% for the extended mission to Uranus and Neptune with negligible loss in information return. Techniques employed include: * Parallel operation of the redundant Flight Data Subsystem (FDS) processors * Image Data Compressor (IDC) using noiseless (fully reconstructable) coding techniques * Reed-Solomon (RS) encoding of downlink telemetry.