Increasing demand but decreasing budgets are putting a strain on NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), threatening its ability to provide communications for the agency’s science missions and Artemis lunar expeditions. While pressures on the DSN, a system of antennas located in Australia, California and Spain used primarily for communications with spacecraft beyond Earth orbit, have been growing for years, the Artemis 1 mission and the demands it placed on the network laid bare the challenges NASA will face in the future, officials warned. “When Artemis comes online, everybody else moves out of the way, and it’s an impact to all the science missions,” said Suzanne Dodd, director of the interplanetary network directorate at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, during an Aug. 29 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s science committee. In the case of last fall’s Artemis 1 mission, the Orion spacecraft itself took 903 hours of DSN time, while eight cubesats launches as secondary payloads took an additional 871 hours. Science missions that use the DSN lost 1,585 hours in the same period, including the James Webb Space Telescope, which lost 185 hours alone. NASA also deferred maintenance on the DSN during Artemis 1 to free up an additional 509 hours. Accommodating Artemis missions also involves scheduling challenges as date shift, something the DSN had to deal with on Artemis 1 because of its delays. “We either have to clear everybody off the network for that launch window or we struggle — and our experience with Artemis 1 was struggling with trying to move everybody around and shift it for the Artemis 1 launch date.”
Full story : NASA Deep Space Network reaches “critical point” as demand grows.
