Spacecraft Ranging from a Ground Digitally Controlled Oscillator

Range measurements to the Pioneer 10 and Mariner 10 spacecraft were made, without the use of a ranging system per se, by using the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Deep Space Network's new digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) device. These measurements were accomplished by controlling the linear ramps of the transmitted carrier frequency with a recently installed DCO instrument at the Goldstone facility and analyzing the received linearly ramped Doppler data with a computer program. The accuracy of these range measurements is on the order of 1.5. km.