A NASA website that provides updates on the status of each DSN complex showed no activity at the Madrid site on Friday afternoon, while antennas at the California and Australia locations were communicating with several NASA spacecraft, such as Voyager 2 and Juno, exploring interstellar space and Jupiter, respectively.
No activity at the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex on Friday afternoon.
Credit: NASA
No activity at the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex on Friday afternoon.
Credit: NASA
“The safety and well-being of our personnel is our top priority and our thoughts are with the families and neighbors who are also experiencing the impact of the wildfires on surrounding communities,” NASA said. “We will provide updates as conditions evolve.”
A separate deep space monitoring station, owned and operated by the Spanish government and the European Space Agency, was also evacuated due to wildfires. according to Spanish news. The Cebreros tracking station, part of ESA’s Estrack network, is located a few kilometers from NASA’s DSN facilities.
Reuters reported on Friday that Spanish authorities tidy More than 19,000 people must evacuate from mountain towns west of Madrid. More than 2,000 people and 10 aircraft were deployed to fight the forest fires. A summer heatwave and chronic drought conditions have created conditions ripe for wildfires in Spain and France.
Without the Madrid location, the Deep Space Network is left with an operational 70-meter radio antenna in Australia. The 70 meter antenna in California has been offline since last year due to an accident that “over-rotated” the structure. The incident damaged cables and water lines, flooding the base of the antenna with 200,000 gallons of water containing glycol, an environmental hazard.
Cleanup and repair are projected to cost between $4.1 million and $4.6 million. NASA officials are combining the repairs with already planned upgrades. The work is expected to keep the antenna offline until 2028.
The good news for DSN is that the next Artemis mission to the Moon is still at least a couple of years away. The Artemis missions place a large demand on DSN, with additional requirements for telemetry and imaging downlinks to support human spaceflight. Artemis III will now fly into low Earth orbit to test the Orion capsule with commercial lunar landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin. Artemis IV, the program’s first planned lunar landing with astronauts, is not scheduled for before 2028.
