equipment failure in NASANASA’s Deep Space Network has disrupted spacecraft communications and stalled near Earth asteroid Study for about two months.
As the federal government is shut down, engineers are racing to restore it space The agency’s historic 230-foot-wide radio dish near Barstow, California. The giant dish, the size of a Boeing 747 jet, broke up on September 16.
Known as the Mars Antenna since 1966 to receive the first signals from a spacecraft observing the Red Planet at close range, this giant dish rotates excessively during operation, straining cables and pipes at its center. According to NASA in a statement to Mashable, damaged nozzles in the fire suppression system also caused flooding, although the water damage was quickly reduced.
NASA has established a formal accident investigation board to investigate what caused the damage to the antenna.
“The antenna remains offline as board members, engineers and technicians evaluate the structure and make recommendations and repairs,” said Ian O’Neill, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory spokesman. “There is no risk to the public.”
Due to the shutdown, NASA employees could not answer questions for weeks. But as the Senate vote signaled progress toward reopening the government, the agency began providing limited information for Mashable to investigate.
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The timeline for repairs remains unclear, leaving open questions about how the cuts could affect preparedness. Artemis IIA 10-day crewed mission that will orbit the moon early next year. Its predecessor, Artemis IMore than 900 hours of Deep Space Network support required in 2022 lost contact for a while During flight, underscoring the fragility of the system.
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Established in 1963, NASA’s Deep Space Network is the world’s largest and most powerful system for communicating with spacecraft. It commands and supervises more than 40 missionsThere is much more to come too. The network’s three antenna complexes – in California, Spain and Australia – operate around the clock so that at least one site is always accessible to spacecraft as the Earth rotates.
on the network 50th anniversary In 2013, Al Bhanji, who managed it, described how important the system was to almost everything NASA did in space.
“Without DSN, we would never have been able to visit Mercury and Venus, visit asteroids and comets,” Bhanji said then. “We may never have seen stunning images of robots on Mars, or close-up views of Saturn’s majestic rings.”
It is no secret in the aerospace community that networks are extremely overloaded. NASA’s Inspector General, who serves as the federal watchdog over the agency pressured to upgrade For aging infrastructure. Over the past 30 years, the data flowing through it has grown exponentially, 40 percent more than the system was built to handle. Under NASA’s Deep Space Network Aperture Enhancement Program, the agency is adding six dishes, including a new 112 foot wide antenna In California it is expected to come online in 2026.
The damaged Mars antenna is the largest dish at California’s Goldstone Complex, capable of tracking the spacecraft’s journey tens of billions of miles from Earth. It was expanded to its current size in 1988 to support sailor 2 mission, which has since left the solar system sailor 1,
As the world’s most sensitive planetary radar, the dish is also used to “ping” near-Earth asteroids. This allows scientists to determine the asteroid’s position and speed, giving them the ability to predict the rock’s trajectory, which is important for tracking asteroids that could potentially hit Earth. Researchers can also use radar to “image” objects. Although most asteroids are studied with optical telescopes, radar images can provide information about the physical properties of rocks, such as their shapes and sizes,
Under NASA’s Deep Space Network Aperture Enhancement Program, the agency is adding six dishes, including a new 112-foot-wide antenna in California, to come online in 2026.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
After Arecibo Observatory In Puerto Rico collapsed in 2020, the NASA dish enhanced its radio astronomy to fill the void. Since then, the Mars antenna has detected 200 near-Earth asteroidsAt the end of last year, more than half were classified as “potentially dangerous”,
It is uncertain how long the antenna will remain out of service, but all of its scheduled asteroid observations have been canceled until at least the end of this year.
“NASA will provide information about the board’s findings and next steps for servicing the antenna after the federal government reopens,” a spokesperson said.
Although network failure While this type is rare, the famous antenna in the Mojave Desert has survived failures in the past. In 2014, a welder accidentally dropped a guardrail while performing maintenance, for example. to pierce a vesselIn 1992, a magnitude 7,4 earthquake also damaged the antenna, requiring repair,