by http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002360/
I've written before about a serious problem looming for planetary exploration: the aging infrastructure of NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN). It is through the giant radio dishes of the DSN -- 34 or even 70 meters across -- located in California, Spain, and Australia that we send orders to our distant spacecraft, and receive the volumes of data that they return to Earth. Missions to close destinations like the Moon don't need the DSN; Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, for instance, sends its Terabytes of data through a dedicated 18-meter-diameter antenna in New Mexico. But everything that travels beyond Earth orbit has to compete for precious time on those great DSN antennas.
...And those antennas are getting old. The greatest of them, the 70-meter dishes, are around 40 years old. DSS-14 in Goldstone was built in 1966; DSS-43, in Canberra, in 1972; and DSS-63 in Madrid in 1974. The 70-meter dishes are unique assets; when one of them is taken offline for maintenance, it leaves the most distant missions high and dry for some part of the day. And even if they were in perfect condition, they are becoming obsolete...
So I was very happy to see today's press release from NASA, announcing that they were breaking ground on three, count them, three new 34-meter-diameter "beam wave guide" dishes at the DSN station in Canberra, Australia, which will be capable of operating in the Ka band.
Emily also reposts some interesting graphs of planetary positions in the sky over the next few years. Much of the network time will require southern hemisphere tracking - hence the new 34m dishes in Canberra.
