 We use very large dish-like antennas to listen for signals from our far-away spacecraft. Like a teacher with too many students, we have quite a few spacecraft to keep track of, and not very many antennas. So we can't expect one antenna to spend all day or all night listening to just one spacecraft.
All our spacecraft are fairly bursting with data most of the time about how they are doing and what they have discovered around them. So the faster they can "talk" to us, the more information we will be able to find out. One of the new technologies we are testing on Deep Space 1 is a way to pack more information into the signal that future spacecraft send back to Earth.
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