Deep space network fragile

NASA’s deep space communications network is suffering from old age, years of deferred maintenance, and an ineffective management structure, all of which threaten its ability to handle the potential demands of President Bush’s plan to send humans back to the Moon and to Mars. That is the conclusion of a May Government Accountability Office report that NASA officials largely agree with.

In addition to noting an “increasingly fragile” infrastructure that is “subject to breakdown at a time when demand is anticipated to increase,” the report said the competing demands for communications time for old missions, such as the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977, and new missions are straining the system. “Capacity limits constrain the amount of science data that can be returned from deep space by new missions that are added to [the network’s] set of users,” the report says.

The report recommends that NASA reorganize the network management to better integrate the communications system with agency-wide planning instead of the current mission-by-mission time allocation process.

The network consists of three sites—Goldstone, California; Madrid, Spain; and Canberra, Australia—each with a 70-meter antenna and several smaller antennas. The network is designed to communicate with spacecraft more than 1.2 million miles from Earth and supports 35 to 40 missions each year.