Woke up in the middle of the night to take a look at the signal from Mars 2020 launched yesterday morning. The signal exhibits a rotation Doppler component.
M0EYT let the Amateur DSN group know that Jon at JPL had loaded Tianwen-1’s ephemeris to Horizons, so I quickly added it to PstRotator:
I’d seen the reports on the strength of its x-band signal, but holy mackerel, it is huge even on my 1.2m offset dish at a range of 2.6 million km!
My plan for this weekend is to move the dual-polarization VE4MA feed to the 3.5m dish to track the Mars-bound flotilla (Emirates Mars Mission, Mars 2020, and Tianwen-1).